O Superman
by sunnywinterclouds
Summary: Modern superhero AU. Dealing with crazed criminals on a regular basis isn't really too difficult for Hiccup, what with his superpowers and all. Dealing with the gorgeous blonde girl who's obsessed with the town's hero but couldn't care less about the clumsy nerd tutoring her in chemistry... well. That's a little harder.
1. A Curious Phenomenon (Origin Story)

"Hákon," Mrs. Brooks says after the bell rings, just as he's shoving his new and improved blaster designs into his already-overstuffed backpack. "Could I please have a word with you before you leave?"

Hiccup bites back a groan. He's used to her talking to him for a while before she lets him go off to lunch, but she doesn't usually call him out in front of everyone and it's kind of rest of the class, led by Hiccup's cousin Snotlout, goes "ooooooh," and he sighs as he weaves through the crowd of departing students and towards the front of the room. Snotlout softly sing-songs, "Somebody's in trooouuuble," before embracing his freedom and heading off towards the cafeteria. Hiccup wishes he could follow.

"Mrs. Brooks," he greets his teacher, with a heavy heart. He knows where this is going, she's done this at least twice a week for the last four semesters, but he still doesn't have the nerve to stride out of class without heeding her request to speak to him. She's still a _teacher,_ after all, and she's more stubborn than she looks, but he's really just not going to cave on this one. Mrs. Brooks smiles cheekily at him.

"So, Hákon," she starts. She always calls him by his real first name solely because she knows he hates it so much. Like, there's a _dash over the A._

"I'm not transferring to honors Chemistry," he says testily, not bothering to let her finish (or even really begin) her sentence. This is not a new exchange for them. He'd been flattered the first few times she'd tried to get him to join, confused the next twelve, and flat out annoyed ever since.

"But you're at the top of the class," Mrs. Brooks almost whines. She's a good teacher, but she's seriously unprofessional. "Your papers are better than my college students', your experiments are ingenious, and I _know _you like the subject, I mean, you're interning for one of the top scientists in the state –"

"I do like the subject," Hiccup interrupts again, speaking as patiently and politely as he can. "I just like it on my own terms."

They've gone over this a hundred times before. He's good at chemistry and he's fond of chemistry, but he honestly just _does not have the time_ to commit to it on a higher level. And just because he's interning for a scientist doesn't automatically make him a potions whiz or whatever: Gobber's a lot of things (inventor, doctor, biologist, certified pain in the ass), but he's not a chemist.

"You'd _excel_ in advanced chemistry," Mrs. Brooks grumbles under her breath, before shaking her head and smiling resignedly at him. "Anyway, that's not what I wanted to ask you."

Hiccup, who'd already been turning to leave, pauses. "It's not?" When has Mrs. Brooks ever asked him to do anything but sign up for her harder, more time-consuming class? He's suddenly intrigued.

"It's not," Mrs. Brooks confirms. "I was actually wondering how you'd feel about tutoring another student."

"Oh," Hiccup says. That's not very intriguing. "Well… I have kind of a tight schedule, what with –"

"I know, I know," Mrs. Brooks sighs. This is another thing they've been over a million times. "You have your other subjects and your _extracurricular activities._" She says that last part way more sarcastically than a teacher should, probably because he claims to have hobbies and friends when she knows very well that he doesn't. Hiccup almost laughs at the thought of her ever finding out about his _real_ extracurricular activities. God, the look she'd get on her face…

"Well," he exhales, sure that by this point they'll be all out of green Jell-O at lunch. Hiccup hates his life. "See you tomorrow?"

"It won't take much effort," Mrs. Brooks says, totally ignoring his dismissal of her offer. "She's a great student, very smart, she just… needs to apply herself."

"And you think I can get her to," Hiccup responds dryly.

"Well… yes. You're my top student, after all, and you're very charming when you want to be."

Hiccup snorts. His oversized clothes and suspiciously lopsided gait don't really give off much of a hottie vibe. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mrs. Brooks, but I think I'll pass on this one."

"You pass on _every_ one," Mrs. Brooks sighs. "Tell you what, if you tutor this one student, I'll stop bugging you about transferring to honors, okay?"

Well _that_ catches his attention. He'd missed out on tater tots last week because of her obsession with his class placement, and that's not something he'd like to ever do again. "Completely?"

"Completely," Mrs. Brooks affirms. "I'd give you extra credit, too, but…"

"Yeah," Hiccup agrees, because you can't raise the grade of someone with a perfect score. "And I don't have to, like, make her into a model student or anything, right?"

"Of course not," Mrs. Brooks says, shaking her head like he's ridiculous. "Just raise her D-minus to a C-minus and you're good."

"Okay then," Hiccup grins, feeling better than he has in ages. He _hates_ disappointing people, and he'd been afraid that if Mrs. Brooks kept pestering him he'd cave and spend time he didn't have doing the extra workload he'd get from transferring. This way he gets to please her _and_ squirm his way out of having to do honors chemistry. "I accept your offer."

"I'll tell her you agreed," Mrs. Brooks says, beaming at him. "Head off to lunch, then, and I'll hook the two of you up tomorrow."

"Got it," Hiccup says, and turns to leave, then changes his mind, spins around, and almost trips over his secret fake leg. Once he's straightened himself out, he says, "Oh, um, just one question, who am I tutoring?"

"Astrid Hofferson," his teacher says cheerfully, and waves him out.

… … …

Hiccup grumbles all the way to the cafeteria. Of _course_ Mrs. Brooks would leave the part about Astrid Hofferson being the student out; she'd _known_ he wouldn't sign up for the job if he were aware that it'd include mandatory time spent with the star of the track team. Astrid's pretty and talented, but she's _really_ aloof and _really_ proud and Hiccup can already see the look she's going to give him when she realizes she has to listen to him.

He stares gloomily at a rack of red Jell-O as the lunch lady puts macaroni on his tray. They're totally out of the green kind, as he'd suspected, and he absently wonders if he should add precognition to his list of superpowers.

Hiccup desolately opts for a suspiciously hard pudding cup as his dessert before heading outside, where he always eats his lunch. His school is far too small for so many students – having a real physics-defying masked vigilante in your town tends draw in more people – and Hiccup doesn't have friends to sit with anyway, so the big oak tree near the front of his school is totally his spot. He's glaring at the sprinklers (which are _so_ not supposed to be on right now) blocking his path when a woman suddenly starts shouting wildly from across the street. Hiccup drops his tray.

"_Screaming Death!_" the lady, well, _screams,_ and Hiccup sighs. This day just keeps getting better and better. Hiccup bends over, grabs his hockey-puck cookie from off his discarded tray, and takes a bite out of it before dashing off towards the dumpster. Hiccup's motto is _you can't fight crime on an empty stomach._ Also _don't change in sewers._

He also prefers not to change behind the school dumpster, but a guy has to take what he can get. The dumpster has been one of his regular changing spots ever since freshman year, because it's so isolated, but he has to stash his backpack and clothes behind it to keep them hidden and the stench is _impossible_ to get out.

Ah well, though. Comes with the territory. Hiccup tugs off his oversized sweater and baggy jeans, both worn to conceal the leather suit underneath (screw spandex), and _voila,_ he's Night Fury. Well, almost. He digs into his pocket for his neatly folded mask, shakes it out, slips it on, and _then_ he's Night Fury.

Hiccup kicks off his shoes (one of the many things he likes about being Night Fury is that he doesn't have to hide his leg) and jumps straight upwards. Like always, he extends his right foot so that in case he falls, it'll take the impact rather than his prosthesis. Like always, he stays in the air.

Likes always, he flies up and away and is neither a bird nor a plane but kind of _is_ Superman.

… … …

Okay, so Hiccup's not _really_ Superman. Not even close. Yeah, he can fly, but he wasn't born on another planet or anything – hell, he wasn't even born with _superpowers._ That crosses out a lot of the DC heroes right there, plus quite a few of Marvel's. If he had to specify (which he doesn't, but hey), he'd call himself a cross between the Hulk and Danny Phantom and Spider-Man.

The Hulk because he got his powers in a lab accident that by no means should have given him superpowers but for some reason did. Danny Phantom because he can fly and shoot stuff and has to hide his secret from his school and because Hiccup really wants to compare himself to Danny Phantom (so rad). Spider-Man because he's a geeky high school science nerd who uses his powers for good and wears a mask to conceal his identity. Except that Spider-Man gets girls. Lots of girls. Hiccup doesn't.

The thing about being a superhero in real life, though, is that there are no supervillains. Like, yeah, there are bad guys, but they don't have powers or anything, they're just _bad guys._ The villains without the super. Hiccup's main problem is the clan of government officials swarming the town hoping to capture him and figure out how he got his powers (another way he's like Danny Phantom, nice).

Hiccup thinks he was probably one of the best suited people to get landed with superpowers, because right away he'd known how to use them. Well, obviously he hadn't known how to _use_ them, he'd spent his first month or so alternating between fucking excited and fucking _confused, _but he'd never doubted what to do with them. _With great power comes great responsibility, _to quote the seriously overused Uncle Ben line, and Hiccup had taken it to heart.

He's not much of a comic book nerd anymore – somehow being a legitimate superhero has taken the excitement out of reading about similar fictional exploits – but he'd been a huge one back in the day. From ages four to thirteen, Hiccup had stayed up every night religiously reading about the adventures of Iron Man and Captain America (he likes Marvel better than D.C., so sue him) and feeling absolutely _invigorated_ by how much those guys got to do. And as he grew older and gradually earned a reputation as the mayor's scrawny, clumsy, screw-up of a son, he became more and more determined to become just like the characters in his graphic novels.

He just didn't know it'd happen so literally.

His _origin story,_ as superhero's backgrounds are referred to by all, had started with his father. Eight years before Hiccup was born, their peaceful town of Berk had been uprooted by the creation of the Dragons gang, which consisted mostly of thieves from around the area but had a few murderers and drug dealers thrown in there, too. Berk was a relatively small place, but it'd suddenly found its few inhabitants plagued by crime and chaos.

The people of Berk were hardy, and most of them had deep roots in the town, so no one really left. They just took extra precautions. Hiccup's fellow students had never dawdled on their way home from school (Hiccup had always flat out run), and no one dared to stay out after dark.

Mayor Steafan 'Stoick' Haddock had come home every day, called upon Hiccup to get him an ice block for his headache, and then bemoaned about the Dragons gang and their leader the Red Death into the wee hours of the morning (promptly forgetting that his son was young and needed a bedtime). Hiccup had spent the part of his childhood that didn't involve school or comic books staring wide-eyed at his father as he recounted the latest antics of the Dragons gang, absolutely terrified but also beyond intrigued.

Hiccup's mother was killed by the Dragons gang. He can't remember her, much less the incident itself, but it'd apparently been a warning sign to the mayor that the Dragons were willing to go as far as they had to. Stoick had been obsessed with their destruction ever since.

No one had known a lot about the Dragons gang – they'd managed to keep it _way_ on the down low, never being seen together or witnessed committing crimes – but they knew that the leader was called the Red Death, and that he was ruthless. Hiccup had been on a nervous edge constantly, always wondering if the man who pumped his dad's gas or the nice bagboy at the grocery store was the man who'd killed his mother, but he'd also been endlessly fascinated. He'd always wondered.

As the year had gone by and Hiccup had become even more of an outcast, he'd become determined to be the one to break up the Dragons gang. His peers would accept him, his dad would be proud of him, and he'd be revered by a hero by the entire town. He'd be a _superhero._ Big dreams for a twelve year old, but Hiccup had a stubborn streak to rival that of his father's. He fought for what he wanted. And he'd wanted to be a hero.

But first he'd had to _find_ the Dragons gang, because he couldn't foil it without knowing anything about it, and it'd seemed like a totally impossible task. Every night, Hiccup would lie in bed and listen for the telltale signs of his dad locking up the house and going to sleep; then he'd jump fully-clothed out from under the covers and crawl through his window into the darkness. And he'd wander.

He'd wander up and down dark dangerous allies where bad guys were surely liable to lurk, and he'd wander throughout unlit parks and wooded areas that looked perfectly alluring to aspiring cults. He'd wander inside convenience stores that could get held up and near abandon buildings that could house secret meetings and anywhere shady-looking that could relate to the Dragons gang. He'd wander until the sun peeked up into the skyline and then he'd sneak back home and crawl into bed for precisely three minutes before having to get up for school, and then he'd doze through all his classes and repeat the whole process again the next night. Always to no avail.

Until one freezing night when one of those typical dark dangerous allies had been filled with _people_. And Hiccup had frozen. He'd watched, hiding behind a trashcan and praying that they couldn't hear his wildly pounding heart, listening for something – _anything_ – that would tell him what they did, where they usually met up, who the Red Death was. And he'd figured it out.

The man that his father had been chasing for over a decade was, in fact, not a man: the Red Death was a _woman._ A huge woman, a good six and a half feet tall and nearly that wide, one that Hiccup had never seen before. He'd recognized the faces and voices of several distant neighbors, but not of the Red Death.

He'd been so excited, straining to get closer, straining to acquire some form of _recognition,_ when he'd accidentally leaned too far forward and toppled over a trashcan. He'd immediately hid himself more firmly between the remaining structures, but he'd known that there was _no way_ they hadn't heard and seen that and they were going to find him and he was going to _die_ and –

And then he'd heard a gunshot. His heart had stopped, and he'd thought – he'd thought it'd hit him, and he'd slowly moved a hand upwards to clutch at his chest. No wound. There'd been deafening silence for a few moments, in which Hiccup had tried to focus on whether or not he felt any pain at all, and then someone had laughed.

"It's just a cat," the man had chuckled, and Hiccup's breathing had slowly eased. They thought he was a cat.

"You got it, though," someone else had said, congratulating. "Think you blew its leg clean off."

"And he's black, too, that was pretty good," chimed a third voice, and Hiccup's stomach had churned. Oh, god, there – there'd really been a cat. It must've been in the trashcan he'd knocked over or something, and now – and now – he – they'd just killed a cat and it's all his fault. A cat. Dead. His fault. And they'd _laughed._

Suddenly he'd been plagued with a vision of his mother trying to run away from the Red Death and being shot down from a distance, and the members of the Dragons gang high fiving and complimenting each other's skill as she bled out. Hiccup had almost thrown up in the snow.

"Someone might've heard that," said a new voice. The Red Death. The woman who killed his mother. "We'd better get out of here."

There'd been a murmur of agreement, and after a few minutes of shuffling, the night had gone still. Hiccup had sat there, listening to his own heartbeat in the deafening silence for a while before getting up on shaking legs. Well. He'd found the Dragons gang. And they'd killed a cat.

He'd walked over to the dead cat in question, figuring that the least he could do would be to take it home and bury it, and he'd nearly sobbed when he'd seen it. Its left back leg was gone, and it was small. A kitten. It was a kitten. There was blood all over the already-dirty snow around it, and it was still, _so still._ He'd closed his stinging eyes, pretending it was from the chilly wind and not the fact that he'd basically killed a kitten, then stooped over to pick up its lifeless form. It was so warm. And then – and then it wasn't so lifeless after all, and it _moved._

He'd ripped off a strip of fabric from his jacket and wrapped it tightly around the cats bleeding stump, then held its weakly protesting body more firmly and walked home as fast as he could without hurting it. He'd stayed up all night that night, applying antiseptic to the wound every so often and praying at regular intervals for the cat to be alright.

He'd imitated his dad's Scottish brogue the next morning to his principal in order to call in sick (he does a great Stoick impression), and had then proceeded to spend the rest of the day fretting over the fate of the black cat he'd dubbed Toothless. It'd been far too touch-and-go for a while there, but Toothless had ended up alright in the end. He was mischievous and playful and no worse off for losing a leg, really, and when Hiccup had finally realized it was time to let him go, Toothless had stayed. Hiccup had reluctantly opened the door on a nice, sunny day, offering him his freedom, and Toothless had looked at him and stayed. Hiccup wasn't even allowed to own a cat, but his dad was never home anyway and Toothless had _stayed_ so he kept the little guy a secret and made his first friend.

After that, Hiccup's plans to take down the Dragons gang had reared back to life stronger than ever. For the first time ever, he'd had faces for the people who'd taken his mother, and he'd suddenly felt her absence in his life stronger than ever before. They took her away from him and his dad, and they'd almost killed the best cat to ever live, and he was going to put an end to them if it was the last thing he ever did. And he was very aware that it might be.

He'd left anonymous tips at the police station with the names of the people he'd recognized in the alley, but he knew even before he did it that nothing would come of it. He hadn't had any proof and, besides, he hadn't known who the Red Death was. And the Red Death was who he'd really wanted.

So Hiccup had taken matters into his own hands.

He'd been working at Gobber's lab since he was nine, around the time that his dad had realized that he was a useless nuisance who messed up everything he did, and it was at the age of twelve that he'd started taking _complete_ advantage of the position. His job was to clean up and help with the heavy lifting (which was silly, he had the upper arm strength of a noodle), but Gobber tended to get distracted a lot and it was fairly easy to sneak off to a back room with some power tools and work on his inventions. Gobber had found him a couple of times, but really didn't care what he did as long as he came when he was called and didn't make too much noise. Gobber was great like that.

Gobber was a one-armed, one-legged, three-Ph.D.'d friend of his father who officially worked as a dentist but spent much more of his time in his workshop blowing stuff up with Hiccup. He'd devoted three months to trying to get Hiccup to preface his name with _Dr._ before giving it up completely and letting the kid basically have complete free reign over the place. For a while, Hiccup had been content to do homework and listen to music, but by the time he turned ten, Hiccup had wanted to invent things.

At first he'd been happy to help Gobber with his new prostheses designs and some basic metalwork, but after that one night, Hiccup had wanted to invent _weapons._ He had to do it in secret, because Gobber would _kill_ him if he ever found out, but he couldn't very well take down the Red Death with a revolutionarily flexible fake arm, now, could he?

He'd skipped right past the easily craftable stuff, like swords and maces and even guns, and had instead started working on what he called 'plasma blasters'. The general idea was that they'd shoot out a blue, deadly ray, but – well, it wasn't going so well. Hiccup had only been thirteen.

And then one night, he'd been trying to balance his byzanium and mithril combination (for a non-chemist, Gobber had a lot of chemist-y stuff lying around) when his classic Hiccup-clumsiness had kicked in and he'd elbowed over the iridium and _bang._ One minute he'd been sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth like he did when he was really concentrating, and the next he'd been covered in blue goop and leaning dazedly against the side of the wall. Gobber had burst into the room, embers in his blonde mustache, and Hiccup had been plenty conscious enough to laugh at how stupid he'd looked. His mentor had decided he was fine and promptly gave him a good talking-to, then made him clean up the mess and refused to pay him anything. Hiccup had been a little sore and a little ticked off but otherwise absolutely fine.

But then, of course, his powers had kicked in. He remembers poking Toothless with his pencil and then promptly running down the stairs and away from the cat's wrath, laughing too hard to watch where he was going. He'd tripped, and the landing would've hurt but not _really,_ except the landing had never come.

He'd just hovered there in midair for a while, stunned speechless, and Toothless had watched him with mild fascination before stalking off lopsidedly towards his bedroom. Hiccup had stayed there, suspended by invisible strings or something, until the front door had opened and shut and he'd fallen down with the shock of the noise. Good thing, too, because the person coming home was his dad and _that_ could have ended badly.

He'd gone out again that night for the first time in months, and he'd jumped up in the air and, again, stayed there. He'd wiggled forward, like he was swimming, and his body had moved up further. He'd assumed a classic Superman pose, with his arms above his head and his fingers curled into fists, only to find that it felt really stupid and didn't actually help his aerodynamics at all. So he'd shimmied his body awkwardly through the air until he kind of got the hang of it, so delirious with happiness that he barely even registered how _weird_ it was.

He flew over the town, in the dead of night, way too high for someone who had no idea what he was doing. And he'd thought. He had to use his superpowers for good, obviously. He couldn't go all _Chronicle_ and end up killing people with inexperience, though – he had to practice before he could do anything. He had to –

The tree came out of nowhere, and Hiccup swerved with reflexes he'd never had before in his life. He'd stood there (in the _air_) for a moment as the impossibility of the situation had finally dawned on him, and then suddenly his feet were cold and he'd looked down to find that he was back on the ground and in the snow.

_With great power comes great responsibility,_ he had thought, and he'd walked the rest of the way home.

It was easy keeping the secret from his dad, maybe even easier than keeping Toothless a secret. His dad was barely ever home. It was a little harder at school, because he kept feeling like flying out of the way or something equally _awesome_ whenever Snotlout aimed a punch at him, but he'd managed. It was at Gobber's, where he always just felt so relaxed and at home, that he'd plugged in his headphones and started working on his plasma rays and eventually floated up to the ceiling without realizing it until Gobber had walked in through the front door.

He'd explained it all to him, and Gobber (being the nerd that he was) had been _fascinated. _Sometimes, when Hiccup is struggling not to feel bad about not letting the government officials capture him and give his powers to the rest of the world, he reminds himself that Gobber studied him up and down and never found a thing to indicate what possibly could have given him super reflexes and the ability to _fly._ He'd even tried the exact same mixture of elements on himself, and he'd gotten the explosion but not the powers. It must be something in Hiccup's genetic makeup, the two of them had decided, or his personality or (most likely) some catastrophic anomaly that was never supposed to happen. Hiccup takes it.

As the months had gone by, Hiccup's grasp on his powers had grown, and he'd found that his ability to fly was even better than he'd first realized. He was _fast._ Like, breaking the _sound barrier_ fast. He was still shit on his feet, but when he was flying, he was… he was _so fast._ And he was graceful. He took Toothless up with him sometimes, and it was cold and brisk and biting and literally the most wonderful feeling in the world.

By the time he was fourteen, Hiccup was ready to start doing what every assorted D.C. and Marvel character had ever done: defend the city. He immediately rejected the idea of spandex and instead opted for tight, maneuverable leather (it was cold in Berk, anyway) that Gobber helped him to design. He donned a mask, too – he figured he'd reveal himself after the defeat of the Red Death, and he'd be hailed as a hero by the town and everything would work out like he'd originally planned. Just, you know. With superpowers.

Later, he'd add wings to his costume for increased speed and accuracy in the air and affectionately dub it the flight suit, but at age fourteen it was just a leather one-piece that'd showed off how scrawny and short he was. Gobber had laughed for nearly a minute when he first saw him in it, but then Hiccup had flown up and rapped him sharply on the back of the head and he'd shut up. Don't piss off the kid with superpowers.

Much to Hiccup's disappointment, he'd never developed any super cool hurty powers, like ectoplasm shots or laser vision. He did, however, finally perfect his blue blasters, and he'd attached the shooters to iron bracelets and hooked them around his wrists and _voila _– he was a superhero. He could fly, he had unreal reflexes, he was fast, he could shoot people down in their tracks if he wanted to (not that he did), and he was ready to face the Red Death.

He'd started wearing his costume under his clothes 24/7, only to find that he looked like an absolute _idiot_ with his already too-tight shirts and pants over his suit. He'd promptly borrowed a few of his dad's old clothes and, yeah, he'd still looked stupid, but less so. Far less so. He'd started dressing like that all the time, and he'd gotten teased a bit at first, sure, but it'd died down after a while and then he was ready for crime whenever it might strike.

His first act as a superhero wasn't actually against any member of the Dragons gang: it was against some random dude robbing a convenience store. Hiccup's spidey senses had tingled from the safety of his Geometry classroom (they weren't _really_ spidey senses, he just kinda got weird feelings now whenever someone was in danger within a few miles or so) and he'd promptly plucked up a bathroom pass, shoved his clothing into the nearest janitor's closet, and flown off to fight the baddy. The look on the robber's face when he'd busted into the store and used a plasma bolt to make him drop his bag of cash had been one that Hiccup will never forget.

The news of a masked, superpowered vigilante had spread throughout the town like _wildfire,_ and suddenly the newspaper that Hiccup picked up off the end of the driveway was about him every morning. And as the weeks went on and Hiccup fought off more and more petty criminals, his dad's complaints had turned from about the Dragons gang to about the disguised hero who was apparently causing trouble more than good, in the end. Stoick was kind of like the J. Jonah Jameson of Hiccup's universe, what with his hatred and suspicion of the town's new secret crime-fighter, except that he had a lot more power than a newspaper publisher. He was the _mayor._ And he wanted Hiccup in jail for interfering with police activities.

Hiccup wasn't sure why. Like, oh, look a guy with actual _superpowers,_ I'm gonna lock that guy up for being totally awesome. In any case, his dad's wrath hadn't been nearly enough to keep him from trying to track down the Red Death, and he'd continued to keep alert and tail his known members of Dragons gang in the hopes of them unintentionally helping him find their leader.

And then they had.

It'd been a Saturday when Hiccup had faced off with the Red Death. She'd been so _big,_ even bigger than he'd remembered. She was different in the daylight – it was cloudy, but he could see her face, and it'd been horrible. She'd looked mean. He'd stared her in the eyes.

"You killed my mother," he'd said softly, without meaning to, and the Red Death's face had registered surprise. And then she'd laughed.

"You're the Haddock boy." Her voice was deep and raspy and cold, and it'd chilled Hiccup to the bone. He'd looked around to make sure they were alone, and they had been, so he'd nodded.

"Yes. I am."

"You're young," she'd mused, apparently not taking him seriously enough to even draw her weapon. "You were young when she died, too. You were crying when we took her away."

Hiccup stared at her. His throat had suddenly blocked up, and he couldn't swallow. He was usually a snarky, annoying adversary, talking constantly and driving all his enemies _crazy_, but he couldn't say a single sassy thing just then. He barely managed to force out, "I was there?"

"Oh, yes," the Red Death had said, clearly aware that she was getting to him. "We had to force you out of her arms. We considered killing you, too, but we figured your father would care more about his precious wife than his pathetic excuse for a son." Hiccup hadn't moved, just stared weakly at her and tried to keep his knees from knocking, she she'd continued, "She was crying, too. She thought we were going to hurt you, and she struggled, and she begged, and she was so afraid when I pressed that gun to her head. It's the best part of killing, you know, that moment when they realize it's over. She went limp and pretended we weren't even there, just started talking to you, telling you how much she loved you and how sorry she was and –"

"Shut _up!_" Hiccup had roared, finally finding his voice. He'd never – he'd envisioned his mother before, sure, but never like that. She was a person. She was a real, breathing person who loved him and gave birth to him and they _took_ her and –

"Don't you see?" the Red Death asked him, finally reaching for her holster. Hiccup had braced himself. "I've spent five minutes with you and I already know who you are. The government's already raving about you, Haddock. They're going to catch you and find out what makes you tick. Except they won't be able to, will they? You're going to be locked up forever, kid, the way I should be, and for nothing but trying to do the right thing." She'd smiled at him. "Serves you right."

And then her gun had been out, and Hiccup had done some majorly matrix bullet-dodging for a moment before getting up in the air and shooting her gun out of her hands with a plasma blast. From the smirk on her face, she had another on her person, but he didn't care. "You're a horrible person," he'd said furiously, his knuckles white from clenching them in fury. "You killed my mom, you tried to kill my cat, you're trying to kill _me –_"

"A cat?" the Red Death had said, looking taken aback for the first time during their confrontation. "I've never touched a cat."

"One of your men shot a cat," Hiccup had said, and the Red Death's face had registered absolute shock. "I was hiding behind a trashcan."

"So you were," the Red Death had responded slowly, and he could see her slowly remembering the incident. "That was nearly two years ago."

"I know," Hiccup had said. "You're very good at hiding."

"Yes." She'd smirked at him, all confidence and ego again. "I stay underground. You say the cat lived?"

"The cat lived," Hiccup had affirmed.

"But he lost his leg, did he not?" Hiccup had nodded jerkily. "My memory's a little fuzzy; which leg was it, again?"

"His left." They were both ready to strike, almost circling each other, and her gunshots from before had drawn in a little crowd around them. There were whispers, and Hiccup wondered if the people of Berk had worked out that this woman was the Red Death.

"Interesting," she'd said, and he'd looked at her and she'd looked at him and then they'd pounced. She dug into her ankle holster for another pistol, and Hiccup had jumped up into the air and was raining down his plasma blasts on her. She was agile, for such a large woman, and she had the advantage of not caring who she hurt while Hiccup was working to protect everyone. They'd fought for what felt like hours, in light, ominous rain, and then he'd plasma blasted her in the stomach and she'd fallen over with a _boom._

Hiccup had lowered himself to the ground, slowly, and heart pounding, he'd walked towards her lifeless body. He hadn't seen her fingers curl around her gun – he hadn't registered her firing bullet after bullet into his left leg until he was on the ground screaming.

"For irony's sake," she had snarled at him. "So you can match your cat." And then she'd pointed her gun up to his temple and whispered, "But you won't survive like he did. You'll die like your mother. Do you want to beg, little Haddock, like she did? Do you want to –"

Hiccup had shot her again, through his delirious pain, in her chest this time. Her face had contorted into an _o_ of surprise, and she'd slumped down for real this time, and Hiccup had cried. He'd wanted to hurt her; to see her sent to prison. He hadn't wanted to be a murderer.

He'd mustered up every inch of his strength and flown away, at an agonizingly slow pace, towards Gobber's lab. Hiccup had just managed to grip the front of his mentor's shirt tightly and whisper "no hospital" before blacking out completely from the pain.

He'd woken up to a fretting Gobber and a missing leg, and it'd been hard. It'd been even _harder_ to find out that he'd been unconscious for a week and his dad hadn't even noticed his absence, but he supposed it was okay in the end. Gobber had told him later that the leg had been beyond saving, and he'd put that doctorate he had in medicine to good use and amputated it himself. Someone had gotten a picture of Hiccup's leg filled with bullets and sent it into the newspaper, and Hiccup had stared at it for a good five minutes before moving onto the written article. Apparently, experts were sure that a leg that damaged wouldn't be salvageable, and Hiccup knew that he'd have to hide his missing foot for the rest of his life if he wanted to keep his identity a secret.

Because the Red Death, for all her horrible ways, had been right. Hiccup couldn't reveal who he was – he'd be locked up and experimented on until the day he died. He took a moment to grieve for the lost praise and recognition he'd always strived for before crumpling up the paper and throwing it away.

Hiccup had stayed with Gobber for another five weeks (after a poor neglected Toothless was brought over, of course) as he recovered well enough to walk around with a relatively unpronounced limp. Hiccup thanked his lucky stars that Gobber was both an amputee and an inventor; there was no problem whatsoever designing him a prosthesis to slip a shoe over.

He'd returned back to school seven weeks after the accident, and while his disappearance there had certainly been more noticed than it had been at home, a simple 'I went on a cruise by myself 'cause I'm rich suckers' had been more than enough to wipe away any suspicion his peers might have had. Which they had none of, by the way. The school was abuzz about the town's vigilante's victory, injury, and subsequent disappearance, but no one had even _thought_ to connect him to the scrawny limping boy at their school. Mr. Super was small, sure, but he was a hero. That ruled out Hiccup automatically.

It was around that time that Hiccup had realized he didn't have a name, and had promptly gone home and started brainstorming cool superhero titles. Toothless had wordlessly shot down every one of them (even '(who gives) A Flying Fuck,' can you believe that?) until he'd come up with Night Fury. Toothless had stared at him and then jumped off the bed, which Hiccup probably incorrectly assumed was a good sign, and so he'd been Night Fury.

He didn't think he'd actually ever get to use it, though. The Dragons gang had disbanded almost entirely after the death of their leader, and Hiccup was sure he'd just be fighting petty crime for a while, but to his surprise, the Dragons gang started forming smaller branches of their previous group. There were the Whispering Deaths, the _Screaming_ Deaths, the Timberjacks, the Changewings (don't freaking ask), and more, and Hiccup had resolved not to kill anyone else so it was really kind of hard to fight them. Even with superpowers, he was fourteen years old.

He also had a heck of a time dodging those government officials that the Red Death had warned him about – they were _everywhere._ If it weren't for Hiccup's serious reflexes and speed, plus the fact that he'd been dodging bullies all his life and knew how to fit into small spaces, he'd have been captured ages ago.

The government wasn't his only problem, though. People had swarmed to the previously small town of Berk, both tourists and new residents, and with them came a whole other wave of crimes to fight. You'd think that most villains would stay _away_ from the town with the superpowered kid, but no; apparently some of them loved a challenge. Some of them _were_ a challenge, actually, and Hiccup had kind of hated that but also kind of loved it. He still does.

He'd shouted out his new Night Fury title rather tackily during a fight with a rather crazy-looking arsonist, and the media response had been huge. Actually, most of the papers were jerks about it, saying stuff like 'but he doesn't even come out at night all the time' and 'why isn't his suit black like the night, then?' Why? Because _fuck you,_ that's why! He gets to call himself whatever he wants, that's freedom of speech right there.

The dad situation didn't improve, and still hasn't. Stoick keeps trying to get articles like "Night Fury: Nuisance and Ne'er-Do-Well" and "The Man behind the Mask: What's He Trying to Hide?" published in the newspapers (to no avail because the newspapers love him). Hiccup tends to grit his teeth and lock himself up in his room whenever his dad goes off on one of his tangents, because it's really just that depressing to hear his own father talk about him like that. While Hiccup's by this point resigned to not telling the world about his secret identity, he'd hoped to let his dad know. He thought maybe that killing the Red Death would win Night Fury some points in his father's book, and then he could rip of his mask in front of him and tell him who he was and finally get the acceptance he'd been craving all his life and maybe even a hug. But Stoick's vendetta had been personal, and Night Fury had stolen what he'd wanted for over a decade, and his hatred for the masked hero is still going strong. Hiccup is lost.

And so his father, Mayor Steafan Haddock, not only doesn't know that his son with missing a leg or keeping a cat right under his nose, but he is completely unaware of the boy's secret double life of on-the-side crime fighting activities. It's ridiculous, to be a superhero who checks his phone constantly during a showdown because he wants to make sure he'll have enough time to do his homework before he goes to bed, but that's his life and he's grown to really like it.

_Extracurricular activities, indeed._

Hiccup wraps up his fight with the member of the Screaming Death that'd made the lady freak out, then ties him up in the rope he's learned to keep handy and salutes the cheering crowd. He doesn't get the hero worship as Hákon Haddock, no, but it's still nice to be appreciated as Night Fury. He dashes off back to behind his dumpster – _so_ awful smelling – and shoves his baggy sweatshirt back over his head as he goes back to contemplating his most pressing problem: tutoring Astrid Hofferson.

It probably says something about him that he literally just finished fighting a gang member with a gun and he's far more interested in thinking about a girl.

… … …

Mrs. Brooks gives Hiccup Astrid's phone number after class the next day. He texts her a polite message asking her when she'd like to meet up, then adds a smiley face on at the end of it (for tact). Astrid responds several hours later with 'how about never'.

He copies and pastes his old text message and sends it again, but _without_ the smiley face this time (feels a little harsh but he means business), then waits for a response. It doesn't come quickly.

Tutoring Astrid, Hiccup thinks, is going to be a lot like fighting a supervillain: they're going to get on each other's nerves to no end and probably end up exchanging a few punches along the way. Astrid is probably less of a threat to his life, in the long run, but still…

If given the choice, Hiccup thinks he'd take the supervillain.

… … …

_I'm gonna have so much fun writing this omg I'm such a comic book nerd. This chap was p serious & long 'cos it's the origin story but most of this thing'll be fairly light with an overarching bad-guy plot and hiccstrid :D_

_byzanium and mithril (from raise the titanic and lotr, respectively) are both made-up elements so good luck trying that at home_


	2. Say Hello

Hiccup's patrolling the city (if patrolling means doing backwards air flips and shooting his blasters at malicious-looking trees while occasionally glancing down to make sure no one's getting murdered) when Astrid finally texts him back. It's around three AM and Hiccup has no idea why a non-crime-fighting teenager would be up so late, but then again, he knows nothing about being a non-crime-fighting-teenager so it could be perfectly normal. Maybe she thinks if she texts him at a ridiculous hour, he won't respond to her.

Astrid's out of luck, though, because Hiccup's got nothing better to do right now. He's dropped more than a couple of cell phones in the air by this point (don't text and fly, kids), so he lands precariously on a telephone pole and is about to read Astrid's message when he reconsiders. His balance is a lot better than it was three years ago, but it's still not exactly stellar, and he's yet to figure out a way to make his feet stick to stuff so that he can climb up buildings and do other Spider-Man-esque feats. His right foot is easy enough, but he'd have to make his left magnetic or something and he can already see himself getting stuck to a plane and being dragged off to Russia or somewhere equally terrifying. Bottom line, he probably shouldn't read a text on a telephone pole. No matter how cool it might make him look.

Hiccup reluctantly jumps off and floats down to the ground before taking out his cell phone. Astrid's message reads_ Tomorrow after school._

He frowns at it, then checks the last text he'd sent her to figure out what she's talking about. Oh, right, duh. The tutoring time and place. He writes back, _It's three AM and I'm a little confused as to what you mean by tomorrow. Like, today tomorrow (thursday) or tomorrow tomorrow (friday)? Thanks, H._

There. That seems like a pleasant balance of casual and formal, with underlying notes of pure pleasantry. Hiccup doesn't text much, but when he does, he's something of a perfectionist. Especially when the person he's texting happens to be Astrid Hofferson.

Astrid texts back, _Tomorrow tomorrow,_ and Hiccup bites his lower lip. That's Friday. Criminals love weekends, probably because they know that's the only time he really has off, so he has to get his homework done by Friday night or else he's pretty much screwed. He lets it all pile up over the week, then does some _serious_ binge writing after school on Friday and spends Saturday and Sunday beating up bad guys. Tutoring Astrid on his homework day… would not be easily manageable.

He responds, _That doesn't work for me. How about today tomorrow? H_

Astrid's response is almost instantaneous. _No. Friday or we're off._

Hiccup closes his eyes to shield off the irritation that's already pulsing behind his skull. Not only is Astrid being a complete _jerk_ right now, but she also didn't write 'Friday or the highway' when she could have and it would totally have almost rhymed. He types, slowly,_ Look, I'm the one doing you a favor here, okay? I'm not getting paid and I'm not getting extra credit, I'm just trying to make Mrs. B happy and help you boost your grade. Can you really not do today tomorrow/Thursday? H_

There's radio silence for a while, and Hiccup's about to stuff his phone back in his pocket and call it a night when his text chime (which, by the way, is the treasure-chest-opening tune from Legend of Zelda) goes off again. _Sorry. Just frustrated. Thursday really doesn't work, do you want to try the weekend? A_

Hiccup smiles at her improved politeness, then writes, _Nah, busy this weekend. How about Monday? H_

Astrid replies quickly again. _You, busy? Monday's okay, but I'd like to get this done sooner. A_

_I do have a life, you know. and it's not gonna be a one day thing, anyway. H_

_You, have a life? Pfft. And yea, I know. but are you sure you can't do Friday? A_

Hiccup can't help but grin down at his phone, and is suddenly sent back to a time where he'd had a huge, life-consuming crush on Astrid and his primary goal had been to ask her out, date her, and eventually become Hákon Hamilton Hofferson the First_._ He'd still have to deal with too much alliteration, unfortunately, but he'd always thought that it'd be a lot better to be a Hofferson than to be a Haddock. He'd never much liked being a Haddock.

Hákon Hamilton _Haddock_ the _Third_ shakes away the memories, which come with the feeling of burning embarrassment and maybe just a bit of longing for the simplicity, and writes back, _I'm sure. Monday or noneday._

_Oh, haha,_ Astrid types back, just a few seconds after he hits _send._ He texts her back a smiley-face-wearing-sunglasses emoji, and she texts him back a sword fighting one, and he's just pressed send on his message containing a frowny-face with a sweat drop when there's a noise. A noise like… like something falling over. Like someone _knocking _something over.

It could very well be a cat or a dog or a civilian or even just the wind, but Hiccup drops his phone and spins around with his fingers poised over the buttons of his plasma blasters. His heart pounds in his ears, like it always does when he thinks he's about to have to fight someone, but he can't make out anything in the distance. His eyesight is better than it used to be, sharp and focused, and he stares at the area where the crash had come from for a long time before he slowly makes his way towards it. There's nothing there.

Hiccup frowns, taking in the area, then nearly falls over in his haste to turn around when his ringtone goes off. He takes a deep breath, convinces himself that he's being paranoid, and makes his way back to where he'd dropped his phone. His incoming call tune is the generic one that comes with all iPhones, because sometimes Gobber calls him in the middle of a fight and this way there's no risk of anyone realizing Hiccup and Night Fury share the same song as a ringtone. Not that anyone would. The people of Berk are the best but not the brightest.

Hiccup bends down and turns his phone over, then groans when the screen's cracked. Fucking _iPhones._ He'll have to ask his dad for another one. He checks his voicemails, as he'd missed the call, and is unsurprised to find that it's Gobber. He listens to a short message about how he's apparently made a scientific breakthrough in regards to prosthetic feet that he needs to show his apprentice RIGHT NOW, and Hiccup texts him _go to sleep_ before realizing that he's got three unread messages from Astrid. How had he not heard those coming in? She must've sent them when Gobber was calling. He goes to check them, but, of course, that's when the touch screen on his phone decides to stop working, and he sighs heavily before trudging home. That's right, _trudging._ No flying for Hiccup.

Flying is for heroes. Hiccup feels too much like a teenager to be a hero right now.

… … …

What Hiccup knows that Astrid doesn't is that the two of them have met before.

Well, obviously they've _met_ before. They don't roll with the same crowds or have any classes together (they even have different lunch blocks), but it's hard to live in the same town since birth without ever bumping into each other. They'd sat in the same general proximity in kindergarten and she'd even borrowed a pencil from in back in fourth grade, plus she'd looked at him enough times in middle school for him to fall in love with her (but, you know, _middle school _love). He'd stopped crushing on her in ninth grade, and they hadn't acknowledged one another since.

That is, to _Astrid's_ knowledge. Astrid is completely unaware that she's actually given the nerd in her neighborhood the time of day before. She has no idea that she and Hiccup have not only interacted with each other, but they've talked and laughed a bit and are maybe even very distant friends. Well – well, no, not friends. Acquaintances, more like. Or just… people that have spoken to each other a little. _Very_ a little. If there's a term for a relationship like that, Hiccup and Astrid are a primary example of it.

Except they're not. Hiccup and Astrid don't have a relationship like that, because Hiccup and Astrid don't have any sort of relationship whatsoever: it's _Night Fury _and Astrid that do. In some ways, it's a classic comic book cliché – boy loves girl, girl doesn't know/like boy, girl meets boy as superhero, girl loves boy – but in other ways it's not. Namely because Astrid doesn't love Night Fury. She just knows him.

It starts like this.

… … …

In his freshman year of high school, Hiccup had been fighting a member of the disbanded Dragons gang. This was before the gang had kind of reformed into their own little groups, so Hiccup didn't really have a name for who he was fighting, but he'd been good. And Hiccup had recently lost a foot. He'd been doing okay, but not… not what people had expected of Night Fury. It'd been kind of embarrassing.

Especially since, after finally winning an hour-long fight with a guy who he should've by all means defeated in ten minutes or less, he'd freaked out at the sound of a noise behind him and shot a plasma blast in that general direction. There hadn't been a bad guy there, but there _had _been a decorative archway, the kind that marked the entrance of a park. And it'd had people under it. Talk about a bad rep.

His plasma blast had hit the archway near the bottom, and it'd smoldered for a second before _sl-ow-ly_ starting to topple over. The people under it had run, of course, except…

Except for Astrid.

Hiccup had been monumentally confused. He hadn't been crushing on her, by that point – he'd stopped pretty much the day he got his powers – but he still heard enough around school to know that she'd joined the track team, and that she was good. And he'd creepily watched her for enough years for him to know that she was tough. That she didn't freeze when she was afraid.

And Astrid hadn't looked afraid. Hell, she hadn't even been looking at the falling archway: she'd been looking at _him._ She'd just stared at him like, _well? Aren't you going to rescue me? _and Hiccup had thought, oh, right, gotta do that.

He'd been fourteen and _beyond_ scrawny then, and picking up Astrid had literally been harder than the fight he'd just won. She was tall and muscular and probably had a good ten pounds or so on him, and for a fraction of a millisecond he'd been sure that they were both totally going to die due to his lack of upper body strength. His dad had been right all along, not having muscles _could_ kill you…

But that thought had faded quickly, and he'd flown up into the air, clutching Astrid too tightly out of fear of dropping her, and a few minutes later they'd landed safely on the top of an office building.

Hiccup had dropped Astrid none to gently to the ground and promptly doubled over panting, his hands on his knees. Astrid had gotten up, brushed off her jeans, and quirked an eyebrow at him

"You've got to be the weakest superhero I've ever seen," she'd said mildly. He'd blushed, hard, but Astrid thankfully couldn't see it through the mask.

"I'm the _only_ superhero you've ever seen," he'd responded, straightening up and trying to appear dignified. Astrid had looked surprised at his voice, which was the fake one he used when he was Night Fury. It was a few baritones lower than his usual nasally soprano, and it sounded stupid and forced and obviously fake but at least it didn't sound like Hákon Haddock.

"I've seen movies," Astrid had told him, once she'd apparently gotten over the shock of such a tiny person having such a deep voice. "And I've gotta say, I'm not impressed."

"Those guys are _fake_," Hiccup had grumbled, crossing his arms petulantly, before realizing that he was a superhero and not a child. "Ahem, I mean… super strength didn't come with my powers."

"Yeah, but there're these things called pushups," Astrid told him wryly, mirroring his stance but making it look cool rather than pouty. He'd frowned at her but, again, she couldn't see it.

"I don't know if I should be taking exercise advice from the girl who didn't run when a giant archway tried to fall on her," he'd retorted, jutting his chin out stubbornly. Astrid had scowled.

"Okay, first of all," she'd said, holding up her index finger. "It didn't _try to fall on me,_ you knocked it over and almost killed me." She held up another finger while Hiccup flushed. "Second of all, I'm a great runner. I chose _not_ to run."

Hiccup had figured as much, but still. That was crazy. "That doesn't exactly make me want to trust your opinion more, As – uh, um, as… asi… asinine… person. You… are an asinine person. Yes." It'd taken a lot of effort for him to not face palm – he'd almost _said her name therefore revealing that he knew her on at least some level and narrowing down who he could be_ – but Astrid hadn't seemed to notice. Or care.

"The reason I didn't run," Astrid had continued, taking off her backpack and digging around in it, "is because I thought if you rescued me, I might be able to interview you."

"Um… huh?" Hiccup had said, eloquently, as he watched Astrid retrieve a pencil and notepad before reshouldering her strap. "You want to _what?_"

"Interview you," Astrid had repeated, quite matter-of-factly. "I work for my school newspaper."

"…Right." He hadn't known that. How had he not known that? He'd used to know everything knowable about Astrid Hofferson without ever actually talking to her. He was aware that she'd always been good at writing, but she definitely hadn't been on the newspaper in middle school. Why had she decided to join it now?

But then, Hiccup supposed, people try new things in high school. Snotlout had been the only freshman to get onto the football team, Hiccup had become a superhero, and Astrid had apparently taken up professional writing. It was actually very trivial, compared to what he'd done this year.

"I assume you're not busy," Astrid had prompted, snapping him out of his reverie. "I mean, you already defeated the bad guy and everything."

"I guess so," Hiccup had said, looking gloomily down at the wreckage below them. No one was in danger anymore, but the archway was still going to cost hundreds to clean up and thousands to repair. And it had happen _after _the fight, not during it, which would make the reaction from the town even more negative. Something told him he'd be hearing about this at length tonight from his dad.

"So you're up for it," Astrid had said brightly, and started writing in her notepad. Hiccup had stared at her, then shook his head.

"I, uh, no. I don't think that would be a good idea."

Astrid had looked up. "Why not?"

"Because it's called a secret identity for a _reason, _A… you." He winced at how awkward that sounded.

"It's Hofferson. Astrid Hofferson." Hiccup had snorted at the James Bond introduction and saluted her sarcastically, his posture rigid.

"Fury, Night Fury. And, yeah, no interviews."

"It wouldn't be anything too personal," she had wheedled. "Just, you know. General information. Stuff to help the public get to know you better, make them trust you more. Get you some good press." She'd followed his line of vision to the chaos on the street. "I'm thinking you might need some."

He'd glared at her and walked away towards the edge of the building, where he'd sat down and let his mismatched legs dangle off the side. Not too scary when you know that if you fall, you'll never hit the ground. Astrid didn't have the luxury of that security, but she'd sat down next to him anyway.

"I dunno," Hiccup had said, glancing sideways at her through squinted eyes. He always squinted when he was close to a civilian as Night Fury. Not a lot of people in Berk had green eyes like his, and his mask had uncovered eyeholes, so he kept them mostly shut just in case someone in Berk decided to grow a brain amidst all that muscle and make the connection. Which they never would. Besides, Hiccup has serious suspicions that there's not a single person in his town that could properly identify his eye color at knifepoint. Not even his dad.

But still. Just in case.

And so Hiccup's eyes had been narrowed and stupid looking, but Astrid's were wide and blue and pretty. Hiccup had remembered all-too-well how it felt to be in love with her. Young love, yeah; immature, unknowing, basically fake love; but still love. And he'd known that, if he hadn't become Night Fury, he'd probably still crushing on her. He'd probably still be coming up with ridiculous, impossible plans to ask her out.

But he _had_ become Night Fury. He'd changed. And Astrid hadn't. Not that he'd wanted her to, but…

"Please," Astrid had tacked on, and Hiccup had been pulled harshly away from his inner musings. As much as he didn't want to admit it, he still liked Astrid, and he couldn't say no to her even if he wanted to. Which he didn't, really. Plus, hey, he'd been dreaming of having a conversation with Astrid since _preschool_, and even though the situation wasn't quite the same as the ones in his fantasies (Astrid knew who he was, in most of them), but he'd take it anyway.

He'd shrugged concedingly at her, and Astrid's grin had almost been enough to pull him back into full-fledged infatuation with her. Almost. She'd started writing in her notepad again, and Hiccup had peered over her shoulder and read _Subject 'Night Fury', Date 10/18 Saturday 04:22 P.M._ Very professional.

"Okay, question one," Astrid had said, jotting down the words as she said them. "How old are you?"

"Nothing too personal _my ass_," Hiccup had muttered, but he cleared his throat and tried again when she glared at him. "Um. Older than you."

Which wasn't _technically_ a lie. In terms of years, Hiccup had a good three months on Astrid, but in terms of birthdays, Astrid had a good eleven years on _him_. Stupid leap years. On the bright side, at least he got to brag that he was three years old and in high school. To Toothless. Because he never really talked to anyone else.

"How much older?" Astrid had pressed.

"Too personal," Hiccup had responded lightly, swinging his legs back and forth above the city, kicking at people like he could somehow send them flying from his spot a hundred feet above them. Not that he wanted to. Well, except for Snotlout. _Bam_, Snotlout, up to the sun you go.

"Okay, like, can you drive yet? Legally?"

"_Personal,_" Hiccup had sing-songed, and watched the way Astrid's eyebrow twitched. His dad always did that whenever he got a call from a teacher saying Hiccup had screwed something up _again,_ right before he'd fix his son with this disappointed stare and then not talk to him for days_._ Hiccup hated that look. He hated it on his dad and he hated it on Astrid, so to make it go away, he'd added, "I don't have my license yet."

Astrid had leaned towards him excitedly, and Hiccup had braced himself to rescue her in case she got overenthusiastic and accidentally fell off the building. "Because you're too young? Or because you haven't gotten around to it? You said you were older than me, do you know how old I am? I'm fourteen, my birthday's in May, I –"

"Whoa, calm down," Hiccup had laughed, which sounded really weird in his Night Fury voice. "I think that's enough on this one. Question two?"

"Okay, fine," Astrid had sighed, scribbling in her notebook for a few seconds more. Then she'd looked back up at him and asked, "Alright, then, so how'd you get your powers?"

"Accident," he'd explained… kind of. Astrid had given him a look.

"Vague, much?"

"Can't get into it without revealing too much." Saying it was a lab accident would pretty much lead to Gobber, who had the only lab in town, and from there even the thickest Berkian could probably deduce that the clumsy apprentice who worked there had to be Night Fury. "Next?"

"Um, okay, what made you first want to be a superhero?"

"Uh. Getting my powers?"

"No, like, why wouldn't you use them for evil?"

Hiccup had scoffed. "_Use my powers for evil?_ How lame does that sound?"

"Fine, for your own personal gain. Or whatever." Astrid had smiled lopsidedly at him like, _I don't know what I'm doing,_ and Hiccup had returned it through his mask.

"Because I'm not a total asshole, probably. C'mon, ask me a hard one."

"Okay… okay, what made you target the Dragons gang and, more specifically, the Red Death?"

"I said hard, Astrid. The Dragons were the worst guys in town and the Red Death was their leader, who else would I go after?"

"Word on the street is that you had a personal vendetta against the Red Death," Astrid had said conspiratorially, clicking her pen as she looked at him. "Did she wrong you in some way? Do something to your family? Don't all superheroes have a tragic back-story or whatever?"

Hiccup had been plagued with nightmares of his mother being murdered by the Red Death ever since their battle, and the visions reared up again at Astrid's words. "I think we're done here," he'd said tersely, getting up on shaking legs and peering back down at the ground. Would he be able to fly? Or would he get distracted by his mom's imaginary tears and blood and end up crashing into a tree? Maybe walking would be best.

"So should I take that as a yes?" Astrid had asked, scrambling up and following him towards the stairwell. "Tragic back-story covered?"

"Yeah, sure. See you." He'd meant to storm down the stairs, too fast for her to follow, but he took one step and tripped in a way that would have made him fall down a few flights had Astrid not caught his arm and heaved him backwards.

"Okay, now you owe me. One more question?"

Hiccup had stared at her. "…Okay. But I'm allowed to not answer it if it's too much."

"Deal," Astrid had said. "How has losing your foot affected your fighting skills?"

He'd opened his mouth to respond sardonically, but his own surprise, he'd slumped against the wall and slid down it, suddenly very tired. "A lot. I can't… I mean, you saw, I can't even handle _stairs_. And I almost killed you with that archway because I'm so scared of getting hurt again." He'd draped his elbow over his eyes and prayed to _God_ that he wouldn't start crying in front of Astrid Hofferson, but then small but strong hands had been pulling his arm away.

"Hey," Astrid had said, looking him in the eyes. Like, _in_ the eyes. He couldn't be bothered to close them. "You're a hero. You make mistakes, but you're still a hero. I mean, you can't even _drive_ yet, I think you're allowed to screw up sometimes."

"I screw up a lot."

"Not when it really matters," she'd said, punching him gently in the arm. "And you defeated the Red Death with literally no muscle mass at all, that's got to count for something."

"Gee, thanks," he'd deadpanned, and the words had come out sarcastic but he'd still meant them. He was thankful to Astrid. She was insane and nosy and ridiculous and everything he'd always hoped she'd be.

"Plus, if it makes you feel any better, you didn't almost kill me with the archway. I had the situation completely under control."

Hiccup had rolled his eyes but grinned at her. It must've made an impression in the mask or affected the crinkles around his eyes or something, because Astrid had mirrored it. He'd been staring at her, trying to figure out what to say next, when his phone had gone off.

"Ah, shit," he'd muttered, flushing as his ringtone played. He really needed to change that to something more generic. The caller ID had read_ Gobber_ and, with a start, Hiccup had realized that he'd been expected at the lab nearly half an hour ago to help his mentor with one of his prototypes. Gobber was fairly understanding because, you know, Hiccup had _duties,_ but he wouldn't hesitate to set the famous Night Fury up sweeping for the next week or so as punishment. Hiccup could already feel the aching neck cramps he'd get from looking down at the floor so much.

"I gotta go," he'd said, and turned to leave out the stairwell door because _stairs were too hard_ and he felt good to fly now, anyway. Astrid had smirked at him.

"Your ringtone is _Radioactive,_" she'd said. "Is that some sort of superpowers joke? Are you radioactive?"

"I just like the song," he'd said, defensively. Even if she might have been right – maybe he _was_ radioactive. It's not like he would know.

"Is that your favorite song?" she'd asked. He'd scoffed.

"Uh, no, that would be the 60s Spider-Man theme song, obviously," Hiccup had said, as if she should have known that already. He'd saluted her again, ran towards the edge of the building, and jumped off, singing _Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can_ as he went. By the time he'd gotten to Gobber's lab, he'd decided that his new favorite song was the sound of Astrid's incredulous laughter as she'd watched him do a small dance routine in midair.

The next Monday, Hiccup read the school's newspaper for the first time in ever. Astrid had described him as _funny, heroic, and sarcastic, with an underlying aura of sadness all around him,_ and he'd ended up reading the article a thousand times over before finally tacking it up on his wall just in case he ever wanted to peruse it again.

It's still there.

… … …

The second time Hiccup and Astrid (_Night Fury _and Astrid) met had been almost a year and a half later, and it had been far less climactic than their first encounter. There'd been no explosions, no rescuing, and not really even any flying, making the whole ordeal rather boring in Hiccup's opinion, but still. Astrid had been there.

It'd started with Hiccup waking up that Sunday morning yawning and rubbing at his eyes, looking forward to a freezing cold day spent doing nothing because even criminals surely weren't dumb enough to start anything in this kind of weather. His dad wasn't home, despite it being the weekend, so Hiccup's plan had been to make himself some hot oatmeal, take off his leg, and curl up under a blanket on the couch to watch bad rom-coms all day with Toothless. But as he'd been about to open the fridge, he'd spotted a sticky note taped to it.

Hiccup had groaned. That's right, his weekly correspondence with his dad was a _sticky note taped to the fridge._ A sticky note. Taped. To a fridge. There were so many things wrong with that image. Like something being taped to a fridge when, hello, _magnets_. And when that something was a sticky note. HIS DAD HAD USED TAPE ON A STICKY NOTE.

Hiccup was well-aware of the fact that he tended to get overdramatic in the morning, so he'd shoved his bangs out of his eyes and tried to ignore all the laws of the universe his dad had probably broken and instead read the note. It'd said:

_Son,_

_Shopping needs done. Please buy – milk, eggs, Gatorade, bread, margarine, and Honey Bunches of Oats. I would also appreciate it if you would search for and purchase some Nyquil. Money is on the counter._

_Regards, Steafan Haddock._

Hiccup had groaned and banged his head against the fridge, then turned to the counter, where the money was indeed lying. He'd seriously contemplated pocketing it and then telling his dad he'd bought all of the groceries and immediately used them up, but nah, that wouldn't work. Who could eat an entire tub of margarine in a day?

He'd sighed and stared out the window to the outdoor world, where it was snowing hard. The grocery store was a good three miles away, and his sixteenth birthday and subsequent driver's license wouldn't happen for another two weeks. He'd have to walk, out in the snow, on his freezing, aching metal leg, snow in his hair and sadness in his heart (which wasn't melodramatic at all). It'd take hours, and his perfect day of indoor goodness would be ruined.

Unless…

Hiccup had shot his gaze towards the stairs, where his Night Fury suit was tucked safely in a locked suitcase under his bed. And, well, the solution had been pretty obvious. He'd entered his admittedly simple combination (_444,_ like _HHH _on a phone), donned his outfit, grabbed his wallet, and flown out the window, promising Toothless he'd be back in half an hour tops to watch _Love, Actually_ with him.

Hiccup had never shopped as Night Fury before, but he'd found quite quickly that he liked it. He didn't often get to go outside casually in his suit, and he'd _never_ been in a store as his secret identity without it being robbed, which was kind of a nice change. There was barely anyone at the local supermarket, as it was Sunday and fucking _cold_, but the people that were around all smiled and waved at him and one little girl even asked him for his autograph. He'd signed her Disney Princess notebook with _Night Fury_ and had kind of secretly wished he could've signed it with his real name. And by his real name he meant Hiccup, not Hákon. He'd take Night Fury over Hákon any day.

"Long time, no see," a too-familiar voice had said from behind him, and Hiccup had spun around to face the blonde haired girl standing there.

"Astrid!" he'd said, scratching the back of his neck nervously and hating that there was no auburn hair there to mess with. Messing awkwardly with his hair while talking was his _thing._ "Yeah, it's, uh, it's been a while."

"And yet you remember my name," Astrid had said, smiling winningly at him, and his heart had done weird things. He was probably suffering from coronary failure or something else teens usually got. "Can I carry your basket?"

He'd looked down at his green shopping basket, which had exactly one bottle of men's shampoo in it because he'd realized that he and his dad were almost out. "Um, I think I can handle it."

"But super strength isn't one of your superpowers," Astrid had grinned, and it'd occurred to Hiccup that she was a lot prettier than she'd been a year ago. Like, she'd _always_ been beautiful, but now she was just… more so. He didn't look at her a lot these days, but now that he was… wow.

"And I suppose it's one of yours?" he'd asked, trying to brush his bangs off to the side before realizing that they were under his mask. He must've looked _really _stupid, constantly trying to mess with his currently nonexistent hair, but Astrid didn't comment on it.

"For the record, if I were a superhero, I'd _totally_ have super strength." Hiccup had wanted to argue with that, but, well, he couldn't.

"Super strength is _nice_ and all," he'd said instead, "but I personally think flying at the speed of sound is maybe a little more impressive. Plus I can do it in real life and not just hypothetically."

"Ooh, bringing out the big guns," Astrid had laughed, shouldering his basket as they walked together and – hey, _wait!_ When had they started walking together? And when – _when had she stolen his basket? _He'd looked down at his hand to confirm that it was grasping at nothing, then directed his gaze back on Astrid. She'd smiled beatifically at his glare.

"You –" he'd started, but Astrid had cut him off.

"Let's face facts, Night Fury; if I had superpowers, you'd totally be my sidekick."

Hiccup was so affronted by this that he forgot about his basket all together. "_Excuse_ me? _I'd_ be _your_ sidekick? Even though I fly and have laser blasters and kick bad guy ass on a regular basis?"

"You'd be a _good_ sidekick," Astrid had assured him, patting him comfortingly on the arm. "And you're a good superhero. Just, you know. Not as good as me."

"_You're not a superhero!_" Hiccup had said, flailing his arms about in a totally wild fashion. Astrid had burst out laughing, and he'd blushed because oh, right, duh, she'd been teasing him. In a nice way. Hiccup had never been teased in a nice way before.

"Gosh, I'm just _kidding,_" Astrid had said, chuckling, even though Hiccup had already pretty much figured that out. "You're a great superhero. An _amazing_ superhero, actually, since you made those blasters yourself and everything. I could never do that."

"Yeah, well," he'd said, grabbing two loaves of bread off the shelf and turning towards Astrid to put them in his basket, "you're probably right anyway, you'd totally outdo me as a superhero."

"Damn straight," Astrid had said, flipping her hair dramatically, and Hiccup had laughed. "I mean, there's not much to beat, what with you having a name like _Night Fury _and all."

"What is _with_ everyone dissing on my name?" Hiccup had said petulantly, stomping his good foot. "What's wrong with it? I'll tell you what, _nothing_, it's fine, it's _great!_"

"Calm down," Astrid said, squeezing his shoulder mockingly. "I just think you could do better."

"Oh, come on, what would _you_ call yourself if _you_ were a superhero?"

"I dunno," Astrid had said. "Something, you know, a little more threatening. Like… like _The Deadly Nadder_! Yeah, that sounds cool."

"_The Deadly Nadder,_" Hiccup had deadpanned. "You like _The Deadly Nadder _better than _Night Fury._"

"At least it's got the word _deadly_ in it!"

"Mine's got _fury!_ And what, pray tell, is a Nadder?"

"It's just a cool word," Astrid had said, blushing. "Is it really that bad?"

"Pretty bad," Hiccup had confirmed. "Try again."

"Okay, uh… okay, how about _Stormfly?_"

"…Better," Hiccup had conceded. "But only because you couldn't have gotten worse. Are we assuming you can fly?"

"Well _duh,_" Astrid had said, rolling her eyes and grinning. "You need anything from this aisle?"

"Oh, uh, yeah, cereal." Hiccup had reached for the Honey Bunches of Oats. Astrid had done the same.

"Never know what might have given you superpowers," Astrid had explained, shrugging, and Hiccup had laughed.

"It wasn't Honey Bunches of Oats, if that's your theory. It happened in an accident, remember?"

"Maybe you accidentally spilled cold cereal on yourself and got your powers through hypothermia, I'm not an expert." Hiccup was very ready to argue the scientific principles against getting hypothermia from cereal, but then Astrid prompted, "So, my superhero name?"

"Oh, right, Stormfly. Well, you're probably not always going to be flying through storms, so…"

"What, and you always fly at night? I mean, I've never really even seen you mad_,_ much less _furious._ Way to be hypocritical, Night Fury."

"Bottom line," Hiccup had said, ignoring her, "you'd be better off giving_ Stormfly_ to a cat and coming up with something better for you."

"Cats can't fly," Astrid had protested, but he'd made a _tsk tsk tsk_ noise and shook his head.

"Neither can people, Astrid. Neither can peeeoooople." Then he'd done a spooky ghost noise and waved his arms in front of him all creepy-like.

"_What_ are you _doing?_" Astrid had asked, laughing. Hiccup had no idea, but it was kind of fun to act like an idiot around someone who found it amusing rather than shameful. Cough _his dad_ cough.

"Demonstrating my pooower," he'd said, using his flailing arms to grab a six-pack Gatorade off a shelf. "See, Astrid? You just have to believe in yourself."

"God, are you _twelve?_" Astrid asked, smiling as she yanked the Gatorade out of his hands. "I can't believe the universe gave powers to _you_ of all people."

"The only six-pack I'll ever have," Hiccup had said, staring forlornly at the Gatorade, "and you just took it away."

"If you're not going to act like a superhero, then act like a _teenager_ at least_,_ _Jesus,_" Astrid had scolded, rapping him sharply on the back of the head. "Where to next?"

"Um," Hiccup had said, mentally consulting his list. "Milk, eggs, margarine… to the refrigerated section!" He'd set off, Astrid in tow, and then asked, "So what are you doing here, anyway?"

"Shopping, maybe?" Astrid had answered. "We're running low on pretty much everything and my parents didn't want to leave the house so voila, child abuse. You know how parents are." Then she'd looked at him, her eyes suddenly curious. "I mean, you _do_ know how parents are, right?"

"Nope," Hiccup had said, his throat dry. "Orphan."

It was the first, like, _outright lie_ he'd told to Astrid, and it had made his stomach churn. But he had to, because… because he _had_ to. He had to get Night Fury as far away from Hiccup Haddock as he could. And, besides, it wasn't a _huge_ lie. He didn't have a mom, and his dad… well, he didn't really have a dad, either.

"Oh," Astrid had said, looking stricken. "Oh, I didn't… I'm sorry."

"Whatever," Hiccup had said. "My family… um, the Red Death… found us when I was little, and she… uh, she ripped us apart, I guess. Dunno what it's like to have a real family."

"That must suck," Astrid had said, quietly, with so much sincerity that it almost physically pained him. He'd checked to make sure none of the eggs in his carton were broken before putting it in his basket.

"Yeah. It does." Then he'd shook his head and smiled at her. "I live underground now, though. No school or anything, I just come out to fight crime and buy groceries. So don't think this will help you figure out who I am."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Astrid had smiled, then started when her pocket buzzed. "Ah, shit, I – I have to go, here." She'd handed him his basket and shifted her own on her shoulder. "I'm totally late, I was about to leave when you got here… take care of yourself, okay?"

"You got it," Hiccup had said, saluting her as a farewell for the second time. He watched her as she left, and he was sad to see her go.

And then, a week later, the town had been abuzz about some all-new Night Fury information, and Hiccup had picked up a newspaper to see what it was all about. To his surprise, Astrid Hofferson was listed as the writer, in important bold print in an actual paper, and Hiccup had been stupidly proud for a moment until he'd read the article.

She'd written about him. She'd written down every word of their entire conversation, from his dumbass jokes to the things he was buying to his defense of his superhero name. She'd provided actual quotes from him, dumb ones like "I fly and have laser blasters and kick bad guy ass on a regular basis" and "Oh, yeah, cereal." And she'd… she'd made him look kind of full of himself. And kind of stupid.

She'd used him.

But that had been okay. He hadn't really expected otherwise. Besides, Hiccup had been called an idiot before, and, well, no one had ever thought of him as big-headed, but he could get over it. And he could get over Astrid's portrayal of him because, well, people love to read about their hero being a dumbass jerk and she was just trying to give the public what they wanted. Hiccup was a little sad but basically okay with everything Astrid had written, except…

Except for what she'd said near the end of the article. _Night Fury fulfills a cliché superhero trope by claiming to have a tragic back-story, complete with the Red Death murdering his parents and him growing up an orphan. "[The Red Death] ripped us apart, I guess," he said, mostly likely fighting back tears behind that mask. Looks like communities comparing Night Fury to Spider-Man have a little more to go on now._

He'd told her that. He hadn't been entirely _honest_ with her, because only his mom had died even though he'd lost his dad too, but she… Astrid hadn't _known_ that. She'd written about his parents dying like it was a joke. His mom, crying and screaming and bleeding. A joke.

Hiccup decided that he was done with newspapers. And with Astrid.

… … …

The third (and last, so far) time Astrid and Night Fury had interacted was actually just a few weeks before Astrid and _Hiccup_ would end up being paired together for tutoring. Hiccup had been seventeen, in relatively awesome shape, and a totally competent superhero with a new-and-improved flight suit. His leg only ever slowed him down if it was freezing or raining really hard, and even then it was minimal because he'd grown so used to the aches. He hadn't screwed up in the public eye for over nine months, so far he was getting straight A's in his senior year, and his dad was still none-the-wiser to all of the secrets that were being kept from him. In general, Hiccup had been on top of the world.

But he hadn't been on top of the world on his way home from a fight that night. He was walking, because he needed the time to think, and his heart had been so heavy that it felt like he was moving through a swamp. There'd been too on his mind to sort through.

First of all, he had the various branches of the Dragons gang to worry him, as they all kept reforming stronger than before every time he brought them down. It was like they had an endless supply of bad guys, and they were getting bolder, too. More attempted killings. And, when Hiccup couldn't get there in time, more successful ones. The guilt was slowly driving him crazy, even though he knew logically that he couldn't save _everyone. _He was just one kid. That was something else he had to grapple with: he was not all powerful. He was just some nerd who fate had for some reason decided to bestow superpowers upon, and there were a lot of things he simply couldn't do. Sometimes he felt just as useless as he had when he was twelve and short and utterly impotent.

And then there was his dad's upcoming election stressing him out, namely because he had no idea whether or not he actually wanted his dad to keep being the mayor. The actual voting didn't take place for another three months, at the beginning of January, but his dad already had a couple of key opponents who were running campaign ads in the paper and occasionally on television. Steafan Haddock didn't really know how to deal with that, as he'd never had to fight to be reelected before, and this was the first time he'd ever really had to be concerned about losing the mayorship. He'd faced a lot of criticism ever since Night Fury had shown up, and the half of the town against their mayor insisted that they needed a leader who was willing to support the superpowered hero. But the other half of the town thought that he'd always done a good job of taking care of Berk, and he'd been doing it for 22 years without issue. Newspaper polls showed that citizens were basically 50/50 divided. Hiccup felt exactly the same way.

On the one hand, he loved his dad and he knew he'd be miserable if he got kicked out of office, plus he'd be at home more and Hiccup's cat, leg, and superpowers would suddenly become a lot harder to conceal. On the other hand, a mayor who wasn't constantly trying to undermine Night Fury's reputation _would_ be a good thing, and if Hiccup could actually team up with the police every once in a while… well, that'd make things a lot easier. But if his dad _did_ get beaten in the election, wouldn't it be all his fault? Because he'd become Night Fury and essentially made the town hate their mayor? How could he live with that guilt?

Then there was the comment his teacher had left him on his Calculus test. It'd been glowing, of course, as math was something that came astoundingly easy to him, but then under that it'd read _have you thought about colleges yet? I know graduation seems a long way off, but it will come sooner than you'd think. I believe you could really excel at a technical university… perhaps MIT? Just don't set your sights too low, you have real promise in a math field, maybe you could be an actuary._

That comment had addressed an issue he'd been purposely trying to ignore for nearly a year now: what was he going to do after he graduated?

He couldn't stay in Berk, surely. They had one community college and it didn't really have a good reputation for producing smart, employable people. He could always skip higher education all together (as many Berkians did) and work as Gobber's lab assistant until his mentor eventually died and he took over the business all together, but as much as he loved his job, he didn't want to do it for a living. And he didn't want to stay in Berk, where he would forever be hailed as Hiccup, the scrawny, geeky kid who was never much good at anything. He wanted to be Hiccup, the scrawny, geeky _stranger_ who people knew nothing about but wouldn't mind hanging out with.

But how could he? He couldn't leave Berk. The people there had gotten used to having a superhero, they'd grown to _rely_ on him, and the remaining Dragons gangs wouldn't stop wreaking havoc just because he'd left. They'd get out of control. And what about all the solo criminals that'd flocked to the town because they'd heard about his powers? They were his fault, his responsibility, and he couldn't leave Berk to deal with them by itself.

Then, on the other hand, what about the rest of the world? Like, New York, for instance. Hiccup was pretty sure that there was more crime in New York City than in Berk. Wasn't it selfish of him to stay in a small town when there were huge cities out there that needed him? That's what all the online communities were constantly saying, anyway. Over and over and over again.

So Hiccup had been fairly depressed and definitely downtrodden when someone had tapped him on the shoulder. He'd been too tired to pose himself for a battle or even turn around, and had instead said, "If you're a criminal, please save it for tomorrow, I'm experiencing an existential crisis."

"Not a criminal, although I _do_ steal a lot of hearts," someone had responded, and it had been Astrid. Of _course_ it was Astrid. He'd looked at her, slowly, and she'd gotten cuter again. He had purposely avoided letting her into his line of sight at school, because he was still pretty mad at her, but now he had no choice and well. She was cute.

"Astrid," he'd greeted, polite enough to be cordial but clipped enough to discourage conversation. Astrid had blushed and looked at her feet.

"So… it's been a while."

"I've been busy," Hiccup had said, gesturing to a tear in his sleeve that he'd gotten from his earlier fight. "You know, saving the town and stuff."

"I get that," Astrid had said quickly. "But, uh… I mean, I've tried to talk to you a couple of times, and you always kind of… ran away…"

"Flew away," he'd corrected her, not denying her claim that he'd been avoiding her, as it was very true. He always took off whenever he so much as spotted a blonde braid amongst a crowd. "I don't have a lot of spare time for talking, you know, between cockily fighting my enemies and crying over my tragic past."

Astrid winced. "Yeah, about that –"

"No, I get it," Hiccup had said, shrugging and starting to walk again. She'd followed. "You've gotta entertain the masses, even if it means writing down stuff I told you in confidence and making light out of the Red Death killing my mom."

"Your mom?" Astrid had said, her eyebrows furrowing. Hiccup's stomach had fallen down to his mismatched feet.

"And dad," he'd tacked on hurriedly. "Lost my dad, too, just… Mom was harder. Because… we were closer. Whatever, I'm not talking about this with you."

"Oh," she'd said. "Oh, I – okay. Um, anyway, I didn't – I've actually been meaning to apologize to you, because –"

"Because you want to get me to talk to you again and get you some more newspaper space? I think I'll pass." He'd contemplated flying away, but he was afraid that might reveal to her how much she'd hurt him, so he'd stayed.

"No, I didn't – I didn't write that. The article. I mean –"

"You didn't write it?" Hiccup had laughed, astounded by her _lying_. Were all journalists like this? He'd thought they'd had integrity or something. "So it was just published under your name with information I'd only given to you?"

"No, I _wrote_ it," Astrid had said, looking bit less apologetic and a lot more defensive. "But it wasn't… it was like the one in the school newspaper that I wrote in freshman year. Did you read that?"

"I don't go to school," he'd lied, not feeling bad about it like he had the last time. He remembered the article, though, and it had been nice. And it was still on his wall.

"Well, it was – I wasn't a jerk to you. Or about you. In my first article. And I wasn't jerk about you in my last one, either. I just… thought maybe it was good enough to be published in the real newspaper, and I sent it in, and they told me they were gonna make a few changes and give it the front page. I was really excited and…" Astrid had sighed. "They changed a lot. The mayor got his hands on the manager and… I dunno, he got the company to portray you in a negative light. I'm sorry."

Oh. So it wasn't Astrid who'd screwed him over, it was his _dad_. Astrid cared about his feelings and his dad didn't. What a fucking relief. He'd suddenly felt like crying.

Maybe Astrid had sensed this, because she'd stumbled over herself to appease him. "I mean, it was still my fault for writing about you, which I shouldn't have because we were just having a casual conversation and I hadn't warned you that what you said might appear in print, I just assumed you might realize it because I'd interviewed you before but whatever, it doesn't matter, I swear I made you look funny and noble and kind and all the other things you totally are in my original article and I didn't call your parents dying cliché and –"

"Astrid," Hiccup had laughed. "I'm not mad at you. Just…" he'd sighed. "The mayor hates me."

"The mayor is an idiot," she'd replied instantly, with so much displeasure laced into her voice that it made Hiccup kind of nervous. As much as he didn't get along with his father, he definitely didn't want the guy to get assassinated by a grudge-holding teenage blonde girl.

"He's not so bad," he'd told her absently, thinking of how hard his dad used to try to get along with him when he was little. He'd put so much effort into reading Hiccup's favorite comic books and pretending to be interested in his son's drawings, but it had never worked out. The two them didn't – they didn't mesh. "He's just… uninformed."

"Fury, Mayor Haddock is the _mayor. _He's more informed than anyone."

"Maybe he has a lot more info on me so he knows I'm a terrible person and he hates me," Hiccup had suggested.

"Or maybe the Red Death killed his wife and he's mad that you took her out before he could." Hiccup flinched, but Astrid didn't see. "I mean, what an _asshole._ You avenge your parents' death, save the town, and consequentially lose your leg, and he holds it _against_ you. I hate that guy so much, I swear I'm going to throw a _fit_ if he gets reelected again in January."

"…Right," Hiccup had said. "But, you know, it's hard to lose someone you love. I'm sure my dad – um, my dad would have felt the same way if he hadn't been killed, too. I mean. He'd want to kill who killed my mom. If he were alive."

"But the Red Death's still dead! Wouldn't your dad be okay with someone else killing the Red Death as long as she was dead?"

_Obviously not, _Hiccup had thought, but he couldn't say that to Astrid. "I have no idea, I didn't get to know him that well. Um… let's talk about something else."

"Okay," Astrid had said, contemplating. "Okay, that thing you said earlier today when you fought that Thunderdrum. What was with that?"

"Oh, that," Hiccup had laughed. He'd been trying out classic superhero catchphrases in fights recently, and today's had been _there's no need to fear, Night Fury is here!_ "Good, right?"

"I have no idea what it's from," Astrid admitted. Hiccup had nearly fallen over.

"What? You don't know _Underdog?_"

Astrid had perked up. "Oh, you mean that live-action movie that came out a few years back? Yeah, I watched that, it was –"

"No no _no,_" Hiccup had insisted. "That was just a terrible remake. I'm talking about the 60s cartoon."

"How old are you, again?" Astrid had pondered. "I thought you'd be my age, what with your not being able to drive and all, but don't think I've ever met another teenager who's watched as many old shows as you."

"I've only revealed watching two, and they're the classics," Hiccup defended. "And I can drive _now,_ thank you very much."

"You're taller than me, too," Astrid grinned, gesturing to their height difference. Hiccup hadn't even noticed that, but, yeah, he had a few inches on her now. Puberty had been cruel to him in many ways, not bothering to up his voice another register, but at least he'd gotten a decent growth spurt out of it. "And is that muscle mass I spy behind that suit?"

She'd gripped his arm and squeezed, and Hiccup had pulled away, flushing behind his mask like he goddamn _always_ did. "That's just baby fat."

"I dunno," Astrid had sing-songed, feeling up his chest. Was she flirting? How did one decipher what was flirting and what was friendly conversation? "Those feel a lot like abs to me."

"Um," he'd said, and almost fallen over with relief when she'd taken her hands off him. "I'm, uh, actually kind of late… for some stuff…"

"Superhero stuff?" Astrid had asked. Hiccup had nodded.

"Yeah, gotta… you know, fix my suit," he gestured again to the rip in his sleeve, "update my blasters, lift two hundred pound weights… typical superhero stuff."

"Right," Astrid had laughed. "Just… you know the Berk High website, right?"

"Sure."

"Well, they publish the school newspaper on the site, too. Just… search for my name and read my old article about you, okay? I swear it was nice."

"I believe you," said Hiccup, and he did. He'd read it a hundred times, after all. "I'll check it out. Um. See you later?"

"Hopefully." Astrid had been grinning at him, and he'd flown away before he had the chance to say anything else embarrassing.

And then he'd waited. He'd checked the online school newspaper every day to search for Astrid's new article, the one she'd surely written after their conversation. He hadn't given her anything worthy of a real newspaper, but the _school_ would certainly take it, especially if she told them that she'd convinced him to check out their website. It was only a matter of time before Astrid took advantage of the situation and wrote some more about him, it was practically _inevitable,_ and he wanted to assess the damage as soon as possible. So he'd read Berk High's paper whenever it came out, and he'd waited. And waited.

And waited.

It's been three weeks. He's still waiting.

… … …

Hiccup sighs and deposits his broken phone on the counter when he gets home. He opens up the back of it and tinkers around for a few minutes before deciding that Apple products are not his specialty and doesn't have even the fainted idea of what makes the touch screen work. Plus he's _exhausted_, and if there's ever going to be a time for him to figure out how to make his phone work again it's not tonight. He'll just have to walk up to Astrid tomorrow and ask her what she texted him.

_Walk up to Astrid and talk to her._ As Hiccup. Not Night Fury. The thought of just going up and _talking_ to Astrid makes him feel exactly like it did four years ago: nauseous. Suddenly he's even more tired than before.

It's nearly four, and he can tell from the loud snoring rattling the floorboards that his dad is here for once. That makes him feel a lot happier than it should. It's not as if he and his dad ever _talk_ when they're in the house together, but at least Hiccup isn't alone. Well, he has Toothless, but still. The Haddock estate is nearly always very empty, and Hiccup's never really managed to feel comfortable calling it home.

But as he bypasses climbing the stairs by flying up them and searches his room for clean clothes, his house feels about as comfortable as it can. There's just such a wonderful sense of routine _normalcy_, even though he levitates as he brushes his teeth and uses a gentle plasma blast to shut his door. Toothless has warmed up the bed, he can confirm that his dad is here from the deafening snores emanating from across the hall, and he's sure that the streets are safe for the night. Sure, he's got the _Astrid_ thing and a broken phone to worry about, plus his general troubles as Night Fury, but for now…

For now, Hiccup crawls into bed, curls up around his cat, and uses his dad's sleep apnea as a lullaby.

…

_Okay a. sorry this took so long my laptop broke but my dad fixed it cause he's awesome, updates should be fast in the future because xmas break and b. this chapter was waaay longer than it was supposed to be, the others will be around 4000-6000 words unlike this monstrosity. Also this was the last exposition chapter, from hereon it'll be hiccstrid and a super bad guy and a plot :) also if anyone noticed, Hiccup's real name changed to H_á_kon in this because it's an old norse variant for 'highest son' and I liked it :p  
><em>

_The response to my last chapter was amazing, you guys are amazing, I responded to all u logged-in reviewers but to the guests ily too. also happy birthday sis!_


	3. Closed Circuits

Hiccup wakes up on Thursday morning to the sound of bustling from downstairs. It feels like it's only been half a second_ tops_ since he'd crawled under his covers and passed out, but a quick glance to his digital clock disproves this hypothesis. It's just a bit after five, which means he's been in bed for about an hour but also means that he's got ages before he has to get ready for school, and Hiccup is more than content to take advantage of this time gap by going back to sleep. He's almost managed to fall into a comfortable doze when there's a particularly loud _bang_ from the kitchen and Hiccup, his Night Fury instincts permanently engrained into him, sits straight up in his bed and flails like a dumbass.

This jostles Toothless, who stares up at Hiccup with bleary eyes like _what's the big idea?_ Hiccup shrugs and strains his ears for signs of danger, then slumps against his headboard with relief when he realizes that it's just his dad messing around in the kitchen. He's about to pull Toothless closer to him and give sleep one more shot when he realizes, oh, wow, his dad is home.

His dad is actually quite often home at this time of day, but Hiccup is a crime-fighting teenager who really prefers not get up before dawn so he usually ignores him. Today is different, though, because he needs a new phone and he doesn't have any money, ergo he's going to have to talk to his dad. And talking to his dad is fairly tricky in and of itself.

As a matter of fact, it's been nearly two weeks since Hiccup has even _seen_ his dad, save for a few campaign commercials on TV. Stoick is gone when Hiccup wakes up in morning and when he comes home after school, and Hiccup is almost always either asleep or out as Night Fury when Stoick finally returns. Occasionally his dad will come back a little early from work and Hiccup will stay up doing homework a little late and they'll make awkward conversation in the hallway for a few minutes, but it hasn't happened recently. And Hiccup can't honestly say he's missed it too much.

But now he actually legitimately _has _to talk to his dad about his phone, and Hiccup is well-aware of how few chances he'll probably get to do that. So he resigns himself to a life of misery and reluctantly peels himself away from his warm covers, shivering at the freezing air that instantly envelopes him. It's October and it's Berk and it's _cold _and Toothless gives him a look that's somewhere between pitying and mocking as Hiccup straps on his icy metal leg and stands up shakily. He then pulls on his Night Fury suit, followed by loose jeans, a heavy sweater, and sneakers, then quickly combs his hair and shrugs on his backpack. He's got to look like he's heading to school early or else his dad will question why the heck he's wearing shoes with his pajamas: Steafan Haddock is a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. Which is unfortunate for the secret superhero living under his roof.

"Wish me luck," the aforementioned secret superhero mumbles to his cat, who rubs his head gently against his palm and goes back to sleep. Hiccup squashes his jealousy and closes the door as he leaves: his dad never goes in there, but he still might see Toothless from the hallway or something. And Hiccup would probably become a classic good-guy-turned-bad, destroy-half-the-town-because-of-tragic-back-story character if his cat were taken away from him.

Hiccup trods slowly down the stairs, almost tripping only six times and calling it progress. He's gotten good at doing many things with a prosthetic leg, but ascending and descending stairs are both a few leagues out of his expertise. He'd probably be good at stairs if he had any _practice_, but, um, hello, he can fly. Stairs… not usually an issue.

His dad is facing the opposite direction when Hiccup first peeks his head into the kitchen, which is good. It gives him some much-needed time to steel his resolve. Starting a conversation with his father is a lot more daunting than it should be.

Hiccup's a bit over six feet tall, but his dad still dwarfs him. He's huge, in height and width and personality, and he's got a ridiculous red beard that hides his expression so well he's earned the title of _Stoick_ around town. That's kind of a Berk thing – most of the people there have nicknames, and most of them stick. Hiccup more often than not thinks of his dad as Stoick instead of, well, _his dad_.

"Hey," he finally says, knocking twice on the side of the doorway to announce himself. "What're you making?"

"Oh, morning, son," Stoick says, turning around. He's wearing a black suit and a green tie, the latter of which is very old. Hiccup knows for a fact that it was a present from his own late mother. "I was just making some breakfast. You want some?"

Hiccup turns his attention to the blender, which is full of one of his dad's classic energy drinks. Hiccup, who does all the shopping, is pretty sure that the ingredients include asparagus, kale, squash, and cherry flavored 5-Hour Energy shots. "Er, no thanks, I'm good."

"No, here, I – let me make get you something to eat." The thing Hiccup loves (like, _loves_) about his dad is that he tries. Sometimes he looks at Hiccup like he's the worst thing in his life and he knows they'll never get along, yet at the end of the day he tries really hard. He _wants _to bond and he doesn't know how to and he rarely has time to but he never stops trying when he can. Hiccup wishes he had that kind of resolve.

"I… sure. Thanks, Dad." Stoick beams at him so hard through his beard that Hiccup has to look away. If he knew about everything his son was doing behind his back… or about _any _of the things his son was doing behind his back…

"So what are you doing up so early, Hákon?" he asks, and Hiccup winces at the use of his real name. He'd earned his traditional Berk title back in nursery school, but it hadn't been a badge of honor like most of them: it'd been a cruel, derogatory insult that his cousin had come up with that meant _small mistake_. He'd hated it at first, even more than his original name, but over the years he'd grown to not only accept it but totally _own_ it. He doesn't feel like Hákon, he feels like _Hiccup,_ and feeling like Hiccup feels good.

His dad is now the only person in Berk who still clings to Hákon. Probably because he doesn't spend enough time with his son to know that he despises it.

"Oh, you know," Hiccup says, shaking off his petty bitterness and actually answering his dad. "Gotta get to school early today, for… uh. Stuff."

"Stuff?" Stoick poses, trying his best to look genuinely intrigued. Hiccup appreciates the gesture despite being able to see through it.

"Yeah, you know… I'm helping a teacher get ready for class today." Lie. He hates lying to his dad. He hates even more that Steafan Haddock, an expert politician with a foolproof lie detector, doesn't even know his son well enough to realize that this is his lying voice. Hiccup _sucks_ at lying: there's no way his dad should be buying this.

But he does. "Oh, are you a teacher's aide now?" He still doesn't sound legitimately interested, and Hiccup feels stupid talking about something that he doesn't want to talk about to someone who doesn't want to hear about it. He does it anyway.

"No, just helping out in science." A quick peek to his dad's face confirms that this means nothing to him, so he tacks on, "I'm good at science, remember?"

"Of course," Stoick answers, unconvincingly, then places a plate down on the table. "There you go, son."

"Oh," Hiccup says. There's a Clif bar on the right side of the plate and a bottle of blue Gatorade on the left. "Um… thanks, Dad."

"Maybe it'll give you the energy to walk to school for once, eh?" his dad jokes, chortling and chuffing Hiccup hard enough on the shoulder that he nearly face plants into his pathetic breakfast. "I know you love your car, but there're fossil fuels to think about, you know."

"…Yeah," Hiccup says, staring glumly over at the coffee maker. Hiccup practically lives off of coffee. His dad hates it, though, and the only reason they even have a maker for it is because Val had bought it and Stoick doesn't have the heart to throw out anything she touched. It's over twenty years old and Hiccup's had to bring out his toolkit to fix it up more than a couple of times and it makes perfectly good coffee beans taste like dirt, but, well, Hiccup really needs the boost. And he really hates Gatorade.

There's an awkward silence between the two of them as Stoick sips his murky green-ish smoothie and Hiccup picks at his Clif bar. His dad finally ventures, "Would you like me to make you lunch?"

"That's really not necessary, Dad," Hiccup says, imagining a packet of dry bran cereal and low-sodium tomato juice. "I'll just get something from the cafeteria, it's not a big –"

"No, no," Stoick says, opening the fridge and digging around for something healthily disgusting. "I'll make you a sandwich, what cheese do you like? Brie, right?"

"Cheddar," Hiccup corrects quietly. His dad selects the brie anyway. He also grabs some multi-grain whole-wheat bread and _I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!_ even though Hiccup doesn't really prefer either.

"So…" Hiccup says, delicately trying to broach the subject of his phone. It's the whole reason he came down here in the first place and so far he's gotten literally nowhere. "So, uh…" _Come on, Hiccup, if you can take down the Red Death then you can definitely tell your dad you broke another phone_…

He can't. "So, Dad, did you hear about the cheese factory that just exploded?" Ah, fuck, he's accidentally started a joke instead of a conversation about his broken cell phone. How could he let this happen?

Stoick turns to him. "Excuse me?"

"A… a cheese factory exploded," Hiccup repeats weakly, already sensing that he's made a grave mistake. "You see –"

"Was it nearby?" Hiccup shakes his head mutely. "Was it the company that made this cheese?" He holds up the brie, and Hiccup shakes his head again. "Did it have anything to do with Night Fury?"

_Why on earth would I go around blowing up cheese factories?_ Hiccup thinks, a little indignant, then shakes his head one more time.

Stoick frowns at him. "Then I'm not sure how it's relevant, son."

"It was the opening line of a joke," Hiccup says dejectedly, "You… you were supposed to say_ what,_ and I was supposed to say _yeah, all that was left was de brie._ Like… debris. But with brie."

"…Oh," Stoick says. "Oh. Sorry."

"Yeah," Hiccup says quietly. He's a totally snarky adversary as Night Fury, and this would usually be the part where he'd say _what, no goude? Too cheesy? Guess I'm provolone in my sense of humor!_ But his dad isn't a criminal, he's his _dad_, and that's honestly way more intimidating.

"Hey, Dad," Hiccup starts, figuring he has nothing to lose now. Because, like, how could this conversation go downhill even further? "I need a new phone."

It's the first thing in their too-long conversation that actually catches his dad's attention. "But you just got one last month."

"Uh, yeah," Hiccup says, tapping his fake leg for a moment before realizing that it sounds just a bit too metallic through his shoe. "It broke."

"It broke, or you broke it?" This is a continuing issue for them: Hiccup breaks a lot of phones with no real plausible explanation as to why. Or, well, no real plausible explanation that he can tell his dad. _I know you think I'm just a clumsy loser, Dad, but I'm actually a clumsy _flying_ loser who you just so happen to hate even more than the real me! Cool, right?_

"In my defense," Hiccup says, "iPhones are designed to break when you drop them. It's a marketing technique, you know, so that you'll have to buy a new one when you –"

"Not this time," Stoick says, crossing his arms and giving Hiccup _The Parent Glare_™. "I am _not_ buying you another expensive phone to break."

"But Daaad," Hiccup whines. "I _need_ a phone!"

"Not a smartphone," his dad says, rather reasonably, and Hiccup slouches down in his chair and pouts. His dad seems to take pity on him. "Tell you what, you can have another iPhone if you can hold out until Christmas."

"Won't work," Hiccup counters instantly. "I'm tutoring someone and I'm going to have to set up meetings through texts."

"Oh, who are you tutoring?" That's right, he doesn't congratulate Hiccup on being smart enough to teach another student, nor does he ask him what subject he's good enough at to coach another person in: he asks him _who._ Because maybe it'll be someone he cares about, i.e. not Hiccup.

"Astrid Hofferson," Hiccup says, and watches with a bitter smile as his dad's entire demeanor perks up.

"Track team Astrid Hofferson?" Hiccup doesn't think there are enough Astrid Hoffersons at Berk High for his dad to need clarification, but he nods anyway. "That's fantastic!"

"It is?" Hiccup already knows where this is going, but he holds out hope that he's going to be wrong. Come on, he's wrong all the time: earlier this week he'd thought that _y_(2_x_⁴ + _y_)(_dy/dx) _= (1 − 4_xy_²)_x_² could be solved by applying N(_x, y_) = _du/dx_ and he'd been _totally_ off on that. Which he's actually still kind of pissed about, because he'd gotten a 96 on the test and that's _totally_ a good score but Mr. Sellers had drawn a little frowny face on the top of the paper anyway, and besides he only missed that problem because he'd never learned the material because he'd been out kicking ass as Night Fury and –

"Of course it is, I hear that girl is well on her way to getting herself an athletic scholarship," his dad says, and Hiccup instantly wipes Night Fury from his entire mind scape. He just feels… really _off_ thinking about his alter ego in front of his dad. "You know, son, it's never too late to try out for a sport…"

And there it is. Suspicions confirmed. "Dad, the season's already started."

"I'm sure that doesn't matter with the track team," Stoick says, waving a giant hand dismissively. "I know your grades are good and all, but I'm sure a college would be much more inclined to accept your application if –"

"I have straight A's," Hiccup says defensively, hating how his dad trivializes his grades. He works _hard_ to do well in school, pulling regular all-nighters to study for tests and be Night Fury at the same time, and then his dad just goes and says _yeah whatever GET BUFF!_ "And I wouldn't be any good at sports, they'd never let me on the team."

"Track isn't a _sport_ sport," Stoick says, like that makes any sense at all. "And if you're tutoring Astrid, you have an _in._"

"I don't _want_ an in," Hiccup reiterates, crumpling up his Clif bar wrapper and tossing it towards the trash can, where it goes in without touching the sides. He regrets this about 0.38 seconds later.

"How about basketball, then, eh?" his dad suggests, like it's a compromise or something. Hiccup groans.

The truth is, he _wouldn't_ be too bad at sports. Well, no, he'd suck at track, but basketball… he could do basketball. He'd cheat, of course, with his enhanced Night Fury reflexes and too-high-jumps-that-of-course-aren't-flying, but it'd at least get his dad off of his case. And maybe even make him a little proud. Hiccup would _love_ to make his dad proud.

But he's far too busy to join an after-school team. And, besides, those uniforms… well, they're a little revealing in the foot area, and going out with his fake leg exposed is about as discreet as wearing a sign around his neck that says _Hi, I'm Night Fury, what's your name?_

Hiccup grips his backpack strap too tightly and stands up. "I have to go," he says shortly. "Will I be getting a new phone any time soon?"

Stoick sighs. "A flip phone. With a minutes plan. And no… apps or games or anything. Not even Tetris."

"Fine," Hiccup concedes. It's probably for the best, anyway – he _does_ tend to get overly enraged by Tetris. It's a game designed to give you that one useless piece over and over again until you need it and then it completely disappears from the programming; what's not to hate? "See you tonight?"

"Of course," his dad says. This is a lie, and both of them know it, but they still accept it as if it is the truth.

The thing about Hiccup and Stoick is that… they don't acknowledge things. There's this giant empty space between them, a vast ocean of nothingness that neither of them has the time nor the ability to overcome, and they just go throughout their lives acting as if they don't know about it. As if they're unaware of the distance between them. There's something gone that's supposed to be there, and although they never externally pinpoint what that missing thing _is_, they both know it's Hiccup's mom. It's been seventeen years, but time doesn't heal all wounds, and Stoick and Hiccup just can't be a father and son without a mother as a buffer in between. They don't know how.

"Bye," Hiccup says quietly, and neither of them looks at the other as he leaves.

… … …

"Hey!" an all-too familiar voice calls out to Hiccup as he's checking out his reflection in his locker mirror. It's not a vanity mirror, by any means: it's more of a _just how heavy are my bags today_ mirror. They always seem to be a varying degree of _extremely_.

"Hey!" the voice says again, and Hiccup sighs throatily and slams his locker door shut. Fishlegs is _right there_ behind it, only a few inches away, and Hiccup is so freaked out he nearly shoots him with his blasters and gives away his secret identity.

Instead, he stumbles backwards a few feet before managing to catch himself. "_What_ have I told about _doing that_?"

"Sorry," Fishlegs says, not sounding very sorry at all. "But I have important news regarding your role in the Berk High academic system!"

"Oh?" Hiccup inquires, hoping his sounds more intrigued than he really is. Fishlegs is kind of obsessed with stats: apparently, Hiccup is in the 33rd percentile for popularity (not as bad as it _could _be), the 82nd percentile for height (sweet), and the 98th percentile for grades (take _that,_ Dad). "What happened?"

"Okay, so you know how Alex Hudson's been dating Gabi Holmes for a while?" Hiccup only vaguely knows that those people even exist, but he nods anyway. "Well, last weekend they got in this huge fight over whether or not she was cheating on him with Barry Mello, and they ended up breaking up and then Gabi started dating Barry's _brother_ who's in college and so Alex thinks he was totally right about the cheating but Gabi still says she wasn't but now she's cheating on Barry's brother with _Alex_ and –"

"Fishlegs," Hiccup says weakly. "I really don't need to hear the whole Berk High soap opera episode."

"Oh, right, sorry. Bottom line, Alex Hudson was all distracted this week and he totally bombed his Calc test."

"It was a hard test," Hiccup defends with a shrug.

"Yeah, but he failed it and you didn't!"

"So?" Call him stupid, but he has legitimately no idea as to why this would affect him in any way.

"_So?_ So he had the eleventh highest GPA in school this year and now he doesn't!"

"And this is relevant because…?"

"Because now _you_ have the eleventh highest GPA in school this year! Isn't that great?"

"Oh," Hiccup says. "I guess so."

Fishlegs flails. "Of course it's great! Keep it up and you could be valedictorian!"

Hiccup sighs loudly. "I thought _you_ were going to be valedictorian."

"Well, yeah," Fishlegs says, feigning modesty, "but I'd like to have some decent competition. Right now it's just Elaine Briggs, and you _know_ how I feel about her."

"She's an attention hog who cares more about making the valedictorian speech than actually focusing on her studies," Hiccup recites monotonously. He's heard this speech many a time before. "You realize I don't care that much about 'focusing on my studies' either, right?"

"You don't care about being _valedictorian,_" Fishlegs corrects promptly. "So you get A's for the right reasons."

"Sure," Hiccup says dryly, and starts to walk off towards his first class. Fishlegs follows.

He and Fishlegs (Francis, technically, but _Berk and its nicknames_) aren't really friends, in Hiccup's opinion, but Fishlegs doesn't seem to have received that memo. He greets him every morning without fail, constantly cheerful and constantly impervious to Hiccup's cool demeanor. And it's not that Hiccup doesn't _like_ Fishlegs, because he really does: he just doesn't think he has the kind of time to handle the kind of responsibilities that friends have. He can't confide his secrets to Fishlegs or show up at his Mathletes competitions to cheer him on because he's _Night Fury._ Being a superhero is a lonely business.

And Hiccup had known that when he'd signed up to save the town, but that had been three years ago, when he was awkward and scrawny and disliked by the general population of Berk. Snotlout had made it his personal mission to ensure that Hiccup didn't have any friends, and he'd succeeded very well. When Hiccup had become Night Fury, he hadn't been losing anything.

But now he's seventeen. He's taller and stronger and, objectively, much more attractive than he'd been when he'd first started the superhero business. He hasn't been bullied since mid-junior year, and if he wore better clothes and actually attempted to fit into the Berk crowd… well, his popularity percentile could very well rise into the 60s within only a matter of weeks, according to Fishlegs. It's a choice, now, whether Hiccup wants to have friends or not, and he'd made his decision a long time ago on the day he'd designed his leather flying suit.

Fishlegs doesn't know this, though, and he seems to think that Hiccup is totally cool and that the two of them should be best friends. He's actually brought it up before, in that frank, analytical way of his: _You know, Hiccup, we only disagree 0.8 percent of the time and our interests vary only slightly from one another's. I'd like to propose that we up our relationship status from that of friends to best friends._ Hiccup had said no, but Fishlegs apparently hadn't heard him.

Hiccup's not really happy with the situation, but he supposes it's all his fault to begin with. For years, he's been going to Fishlegs for Night Fury stats for various reasons. Sometimes it's because he's just lost a battle and he need reassurance that, despite his failures, he's still got a 91 percent success rate and a 0.3 percent casualty rate. Sometimes he wants to beat an old speed record of his but he can't remember exactly what it is and he knows Fishlegs will know. And sometimes he just gets tired of his dad and online forums bashing his name and he simply wants to hear someone sing his praises for a few minutes. Egotistical, he knows, but he has those days when he needs it.

Fishlegs is, to Hiccup's knowledge, the biggest Night Fury fan in the world. No, really. He is. He'd been a superhero nerd since he was a little kid, and when a real life person who could _fly_ showed up in his own hometown, of all places, Fishlegs had gone a little nuts. He keeps a diary of Night Fury sightings and writes angry letters to the newspaper if they ever publish anything remotely negative about his hero, and he's constantly talking about him in class and on his blog and to himself. It's a little awkward for Hiccup, sometimes, seeing as he _is_ Night Fury, but most of the time he just feels gratuitous. At least there's _someone_ out there who thinks that he can do no wrong.

But that's the underlying issue of why Hiccup thinks he and Fishlegs can't be friends: Hiccup is Night Fury. Friends don't lie to friends about being their superhero idol, that's rule 101.

He obviously can't go about explaining this to Fishlegs, though, so the huge boy continues to think they're BFFs and Hiccup continues to do his best to shoo him away with his uncaring attitude. It hasn't worked so far.

"I know you're eleventh, but there's only a tiny difference between you and everyone in front of you, so you really only need a tenth of a point to beat Elaine," Fishlegs says, digging into his backpack and shuffling around with his notes. Hiccup catches his own name (Hiccup, not Night Fury) a few times, along with those of Alex Hudson, Elaine Briggs, and some of the few other smart kids at Berk High. Hiccup makes a mental note that he's the only one with his nickname written down rather than his real one – probably because he and Fishlegs are 'friends'. "I think that if you move up to Honors Chemistry and do that extra project in English, you'd be a shoe-in for salutatorian."

"Not gonna happen," Hiccup replies instantly. What is _with_ everyone trying to make him take Honors Chemistry? Like, plot twist: he doesn't want to. "I don't care about being valedictorian, remember?"

"You'd be _salutatorian,_" Fishlegs insists. "Unless you upped your game and signed up for more electives next semester. Which, by the way, wouldn't be too –"

"I'm sure I couldn't beat you, anyway," Hiccup interrupts, and he actually means it. Fishlegs not only likes school and is good at school but has _time_ for school, which is a lot more than Hiccup can say.

"Maybe," Fishlegs replies, "but if you'd just put in a little effort, we could totally graduate val and sal. Wouldn't that be awesome? The two of us at the top of the class? Best friends _and_ the smartest people in our year?"

"Sure, Fishlegs," Hiccup says, not bothering to remind him that they he is neither one of the smartest people in their year nor Fishlegs's best friend. "I'm really not doing Honors Chem, though."

"Well, if I can't convince you, Mrs. Brooks probably will." Here Hiccup turns to glare at him. He complains about Mrs. Brooks hassling him _one time_ and Fishlegs thinks it's the funniest thing to happen since _Deadpool Killustrated._

"For your information," Hiccup says, fiddling very discreetly with the tiny blaster hidden under his left sleeve like he tends to do when he's agitated, "I finally got her off my back on that."

"What?" Fishlegs looks crestfallen. "How?"

"I agreed to tutor one of her students for her."

"Oh, man," Fishlegs says, obviously devastated that he's lost perfectly good teasing material, but he perks up fast. "Well, maybe we can use this to boost your popularity level. Who're you tutoring?"

Damn, this again. "Astrid Hofferson," Hiccup says, and braces himself for impact. He doesn't brace hard enough.

"_Astrid Hofferson?_ 98th percentile popularity, 96th percentile athleticism, 100th percentile attractiveness?"

"Good numbers," Hiccup mutters. "Yeah, I guess that's her."

"Amazing," Fishlegs breathes. "You know, it's interesting because she's in the 53rd percentile overall grades-wise but her English grade is the highest in our year, she does all the extra credit assignments and –"

"This is interesting?" Hiccup cuts him off, because he already _knows_ that Astrid is good at writing but apparently bad at other stuff. She needs tutoring, after all. "Look, we're going to be late for class, so…"

"Oh, right," Fishlegs says, checking his analogue watch because he still thinks they're cool for some reason. "Just promise me that you won't ditch me for a cooler best friend when your popularity rises a minimum of 11.4 percent just from being exposed to Astrid, okay?"

"I promise," Hiccup says, even though he _wants_ to say that he couldn't possibly replace Fishlegs with a new friend because the two of them ARE NOT FRIENDS. He's not that mean, though, so instead he offers Fishlegs a little wave before he heads off for art class (which is secretly his favorite) while Fishlegs makes his way towards Biology.

He keeps an eye out for Astrid the whole rest of the day, but he has no idea what her class schedule is and apparently there's no overlap between her free periods and his, and he ends up not seeing her even once. It's the same story Friday, so he's left with no choice but to hope that she waits for him after school on Monday like they'd kind-of-sort-of planned through texts before his phone broke.

His weekend is actually fairly low-key, for once, with only a few bad guys to fight and more than enough time to browse for cheap flip phones on ebay. On Saturday, his dad leaves him thirty bucks and a note on the counter that reads _this is your budget,_ raising their interaction rate to two times in as many days. Hiccup's starting to feel kind of smothered.

On Sunday, Hiccup is hit with the sudden realization that Astrid has looked Night Fury in the eyes before. Like, sure, it was a few years ago, and it was when he was emotionally vulnerable and kind of teary so he probably looked totally different, but still. They'd made eye contact for like, _ten seconds._ She knows what his eyes look like. This is bad.

What if, by some chance, Astrid takes the time to look Hiccup straight in the eyes for a couple of moments and _sees_ something there? His entire cover could be blown, and Astrid is a journalist who clearly has no trouble exploiting him for newspaper time and then the whole world would know about him and his dad would disown him and Fishlegs would hate him for lying and he'd be captured and experimented on and kept in a white room to prevent stimulation and –

Okay, he's got to do something about that.

The first thing he tries is a pair of sunglasses, but they make him give off kind of a jackass vibe rather than a cool or aloof one. He decides to save them for Plan B.

His next idea is a better one, and he spends half an hour digging through his disorganized desk drawers until he finds his old pair of glasses. He'd had pretty bad eyesight up until the whole Night Fury thing, but his powers had given him 25/20 vision or something. Kind of like Peter Parker.

When he puts the glasses on, the prescription is _way_ too strong and he instantly feels a headache starting to bloom near the front of his skull. So he pops out the lenses and drives over to Gobber's to cut himself some appropriately-shaped regular glass as a replacement (and ends up having to scrub the floors as punishment for being absent for most of the week, but hey, that's Gobber for you). His new and improved non-prescription glasses still disorient him a little bit, but it's not like he'll be fighting in them or anything, and they definitely fuzz up his eyes enough that Astrid will never make the connection between him and Night Fury.

He looks like a nerd, but what else is new?

_Astrid Middle-Name Hofferson, _he thinks, glaring at his reflection, _I'm ready for you._

… … …

Fishlegs greets him in his usually cheery way on Monday morning, then does a double-take when he notices Hiccup's glasses. "Whoa, when did _that_ happen?"

"Lost my contacts," Hiccup lies smoothly, hating that he's actually getting a little better at it. The only person he really feels guilty making stuff up to now is his dad, and that's… good, technically, but it feels bad. Hiccup's not proud of being a liar.

"I never knew you needed corrective lenses," Fishlegs says, observing Hiccup's face. They'd never interacted back when Hiccup actually wore glasses, from fourth grade to eighth. "This _totally_ changes your status."

"Of course it does," Hiccup grumbles, almost shutting his own hand in his locker door because he can't see it that well. Fishlegs stares at him. "Um, old prescription."

"Oh, okay. Anyway," he walks around Hiccup, analyzing him contemplatively in that _way_ Fishlegs does, "I think you actually look better with the glasses."

"Oh." Hiccup examines his reflection in his locker mirror. "Really?"

"Totally," Fishlegs confirms. "This, plus the Astrid thing… plus you already have _some_ status as the mayor's son… you could easily be in the 50th popularity percentile by this time next week."

"Right," Hiccup says, then realizes something he _totally_ should have put together a few days ago. "Speaking of the Astrid thing, don't you have English with her?"

Fishlegs nods. "Yeah, why?"

"Just tell her to meet me at the front of the school for tutoring later, okay?"

"Sure," Fishlegs says, beaming at him, and Hiccup feels bad. Fishlegs is obviously aware of Hiccup's apathy towards him on most days, and whenever Hiccup asks him for a favor he _jumps_ on it. Like that makes them real friends. Even though Hiccup very rarely has the chance to do something nice in return.

"Thanks," Hiccup says, equal parts sincere and guilty, before turning to leave. Fishlegs stops him.

"Hey," he starts, looking rather nervous. "You know, I have this competition on Friday… for Mathletes… it's kind of a big thing… you know, mid-finals… my parents and aunts and uncles are going… and, um… you want to come, too?"

And there it is. "I'll see what I can do," Hiccup says, smiling tightly, but he knows that he probably won't be able to make it. Friday is his homework day. "See you later?"

"Later," Fishlegs says, looking shyly happy, and Hiccup is sure that when he walks away there's a spring in his step. Hiccup waits until he's out of sight, then bangs his head against his locker and curses himself out loud for being such a terrible person.

Sometimes he's sure that his Night Fury problems are his easiest.

… … …

Fishlegs must come through, because Astrid is leaning coolly against a tree in front of the school when Hiccup glances in that direction. She looks totally bored and aloof while also managing to look completely unapproachably _awesome_ – Hiccup couldn't master that pose if he practiced for a year.

"Hey," he greets her when he walks up, feeling more nervous than he has since his first fight after losing his foot. His palms are ice cold and sweaty at the same time, which is kind of weird. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

"Had to, didn't I?" Astrid responds shortly, and Hiccup thinks _eurgh._ This isn't going to be fun. Not that he'd ever supposed it would be, but still.

He's about to say something dumb and embarrassing (he's not sure what it would've been, but it's safe to say that he probably would have had to leave the country afterwards) when he realizes that the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach isn't just from nerves. It's from… oh, _fuck._

His Night Fury senses… are not very pleasant. He doesn't get, like, a cold chill running down his spine or a prickling sensation at the back of his neck or even a puff of blue breath to alert him of danger. He just feels like he's about to throw up. The first time it had happened, in the middle of class, he'd actually doubled over and retched from how much it had _hurt._ His insides had seized up and his body had suddenly cramped and the entire room had spun from how dizzy he'd been, and then the next moment he had been absolutely _fine._ Hiccup would like to say that things have gotten better since then, but… they haven't.

Now, he coughs through the pain and waits for the raging headache he has to fade away. When he comes back to himself, he's looking straight at Astrid, who's regarding him with the kind of expression you might give a bug on the bottom of your shoe.

"Um," Hiccup says, a little disoriented, because that been a _bad_ one and that usually means that something really really dangerous is going down. "Um, I have… I have to go to the bathroom." Not his best excuse, but it'll buy him a few minutes. "Be right back."

Astrid opens her mouth, probably to complain, but Hiccup's already dashing off towards the mens' restrooms near the front of the school. Once there, he locks himself inside of a stall and removes his oversized clothing, his left shoe, and his stupid new glasses with shaking hands. No matter how many times he's done this, it's still nothing short of _nerve wracking_ to change into his Night Fury costume. What if someone saw Hiccup go in and sees Night Fury come out, what if someone is looking at his mismatched feet from under the stall door, what if he leaves his backpack here and someone takes it and figures out his secret… the possibilities are endless and terrifying.

Hiccup ignores his usual pre-fight jitters as best as he can and pulls on his Night Fury mask. He always feels a little safer with the mask on. In the interest of extra caution, he pries open the small window at the back of the bathroom and just barely manages to squeeze through it, then stashes his backpack safely behind a bush and covers it with a few dead leaves to make sure it's absolutely impossible to see from a distance.

And then he flies away.

Sometimes it's hard to find what's causing his Night Fury senses to go off, and occasionally he'll have those days where he spends hours searching for a crime in progress without ever finding a goddamn thing. This is not one of those days.

Slightly enhanced hearing is one of the things he'd gotten with his powers, but he thinks even a half-deaf Night Fury would be able to hear the commotion coming from the town plaza. Hiccup goes off in that direction, all the while cursing the fact that he no longer has a phone to check the time on. It's probably been… what, five minutes since he'd used his bathroom excuse? At _least?_ And he hasn't even started fighting the bad guy yet, Astrid is going to kill him…

He speeds up his flight rate (fast enough to be ridiculous but not so fast that he throws up) and gets to the plaza in just under a minute. The entire place is in a complete state of panic, with rather hard-to-phase Berkians running around and freaking the hell out. Hiccup's stomach tightens.

"Make way," he says in his Night Fury voice, pleased to note that his nervousness doesn't reverberate in his tone. He pushes through the crowd and into the store where most of the chaos seems to be ensuing.

Hiccup knows who most of the gang members in Berk are, so he's surprised to see a completely unfamiliar face standing behind the counter with a gun pressed against the cashier's head. This is bad. It's always hard to deal with a situation where you can't attack without risking the life of a civilian, but it's even _harder_ when you have no idea who you're dealing with. Should he snark, should use his calm voice, should he back off?

To Hiccup's jaw-dropping shock, though, the new guy instantly releases the cashier when Hiccup – ahem, _Night Fury_ – approaches him. The bad guys usually tend to grip their hostages a lot harder when they're faced with him as an adversary, not _let them go_, and for a second Hiccup is rooted to the floor with how taken aback he is.

"Night Fury, as I live and breathe," the man says, in rather smooth-sounding British accent. He's got shortish black hair, stupid looking sideburns, and ugly blue-gray tattoos marring his otherwise decently attractive face. Hiccup assumes a defensive stance.

"That's right. And you are…?"

He doesn't expect an answer (because what kind of guy would actually reveal his name to Night Fury?) but the man gives him one anyway. "Eret, son of Eret, and apprentice to the man who's going to make you his."

"Oh." Well. "That's… a little creepy. Tell him I'm flattered, but no thanks."

Eret son of Eret laughs, and the way he _does_ it is kind of terrifying. "I wouldn't say it's really up to you. _Men!_"

Hiccup doesn't even have the time to comprehend the order before a bunch of guys with crossbows jump out from behind the shelves. Like, actual _crossbows._ He's used to guns, but crossbows are a little out of his area of expertise.

Nevertheless, though, he jumps up into the air and dodges the arrows they shoot at him from their respective corners. Before they can reload, Hiccup quick-as-lightning shoots plasma blasts at all of their hands and their weapons go flying.

"Note to Eret son of Eret," Hiccup says, turning back to his original combatant, "it's the twenty-first century. Please arm your men with guns. Nice try, though."

Eret son of Eret (screw it, Hiccup's just going to call him Eret) _does_ have a gun, and he points it at Hiccup as he glares. He looks like to type to get angry quickly, which Hiccup can definitely use to his advantage.

"You know," he says, ignoring the gun in his face, "I think the most dangerous thing about you is your accent. That thing is _sharp_, man, I might cut myself on the way you roll your r's."

Eret shoots. Hiccup ducks.

"I can do a pretty decent Scottish accent, you know," he starts again, pretending like a bullet didn't just almost graze the top of his mask. "Ahem –_ excuse me, barmaid, I'm afraid yeh've brought me the wrong villain! I ordered a comp'tent man, with brains to go with his muscles and a gun bigger than my –_"

Eret shoots again. Hiccup ducks.

"I've heard a lot about you," Eret growls, adjusting his gun threateningly, "but never anything about how _annoying_ you are."

"Ah, well, you know," Hiccup shrugs. "I'm so handsome they forget about my big mouth."

"Unlikely," Eret says, his finger poised on the trigger. Hiccup, for his part, is poised to run. "I can't wait for Drago to get his hands on you."

"Drago?" Hiccups snorts. "Like a dragon? Is his favorite band _Imagine Dragos? _Can he fly and shoot fire?"

And then the way Eret looks at Hiccup isn't irritated anymore –it's nothing short of _predatory._ The hair on the back of his neck prickles underneath his mask. "Shoot fire… no. Fly… very soon."

That's when Hiccup realizes that there is something bad going on here and he should really go right now. These guys aren't after the citizens of Berk or money in the cash register, they're after _him_, and something about the smile on Eret's face make him think that his Drago guy might actually be able to… to make himself fly. With –God, and he doesn't know_ how_ –with Hiccup's powers.

Plus, Astrid will be missing him by now.

"Well," he says, in a quick exhale. "Okay, so, this has been fun, we should do it again sometime. Unfortunately, I've got to go, so…"

"I don't think so," Eret says, and makes a motion with the hand that's not holding the gun. Hiccup turns, and oh, crap, the crossbow guys are armed and dangerous again.

They're still pretty useless, though, and Hiccup has no more trouble dodging their arrows this time than he did the first. He struggles a little more to simultaneously avoid the bullets that Eret is firing at him, but hey, he pulls it off quite nicely.

The previous inhabitants of the store have all fled, and Hiccup is confident that Eret and his men simply don't care enough to go after them or anything. So he ducks out the automatic doors and salutes the bad guys at large before opening up his suit wings and flying away.

Eret, the cliché villain that he is, calls out to Hiccup as he fades up into the clouds. "He's coming for you, Night Fury! He's coming for you and he's going to take everything you've got!" Hiccup would bet that if he turned around, Eret would be shaking his fist ruefully up at the sky.

Hiccup thinks, _at least he didn't say he's going to get me if it's the last thing he does._

… … …

Astrid's not under the tree anymore when Hiccup finally redresses and emerges from behind the school. It's not like he can really blame her, seeing as it's been nearly twenty minutes since he'd dashed off, but, well, _still._ How very rude of her.

He's about to call it a day (how is it only three thirty? He's beyond exhausted) when he spots her trudging gloomily down the sidewalk. She looks kind of depressed, which takes Hiccup by surprise and definitely doesn't help his nerves about approaching her, but he goes up to her anyway.

"Hey," he greets her again, and hopes that things go better this time. "So… I'm back."

"Oh, Hiccup," she says, like she'd forgotten about him. "Sorry I disappeared, there was a fight downtown."

"…Ah," Hiccup responds, glad to have dodge _that_ bullet (along with all the others he's dodged today). "Yeah, I was wondering. Um, you okay?"

"I'm fine," Astrid says, even though her tone kind of contradicts her words. "Just… I totally missed him. He was gone by the time I got there."

"Oh." So she'd been trying to get a scoop. "Uh… you mean Night Fury, right?"

"Obviously," she scoffs. "Although I suppose _you_ wouldn't care."

"…Right." He has no idea where that misplaced accusation might have stemmed from, but then again, he's one of the only people in school who's never voiced his opinion on Night Fury, so maybe that's it. "So… where are we doing this?"

"My house, I guess," Astrid says. "You got a car?"

"It's parked around the corner." He jerks his head in that general direction, then feels stupid for doing it. Nothing new there.

"Lead the way," Astrid says. Hiccup does.

_This story should now be on a weekly schedule, I've just been really busy lately with finals and two birthdays and xmas and new years :) this chapter was still too long and I hate myself but at least I got to do stoick and fishlegs and set up the main plot. can't wait to write gobber :D  
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_Happy 2015! you guys continue to be absolutely ah-may-zing and I love you more than words can say  
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